Anfang Gut, Alles Gut: Actualizations of the Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun 1913

Premiered in St. Petersburg in 1913, and written in “zaum”--a Russian Futurist nonsense language--Victory over the Sun was a vastly ambitious opera, a collaboration between the poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, the composer and painter Mikhail Matyushin and the painter Kazimir Malevich (who made his legendary “Black Square” painting for the work). Anfang Gut. Alles Gut. documents a longterm project by an ever-expanding group of artists, musicians, architects and writers who, since 2008, have worked with the opera’s historical documentation and reception history to translate this mythic gesamtkunstwerk into the present. Katrin Bahrs, Thomas Baldischwyler, Tschilp, Nine Budde, Natalie Czech, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Kirsten Forkert, Emma Hedditch and Elizabeth Orr, Fox Hysen and Susanne M. Winterling, Heiko Karn and Katrin Mayer, Nicholas Matranga, Ruth May and Michaela Melián are among the many artists contributing to the book.