Art-Life Balance, or Utopia No More: Staging the Biopolitical in “DAU”

Two decades after its inception, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU remains a profound conceptual blind spot within contemporary critique and cultural theory. The project’s recent triumph at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in September 2026, where it was awarded the prestigious Silver Lion for Best Director, has only re-radicalized the controversy, highlighting a paralyzing stagnation in its critical reception. Despite this monumental validation by the global cinematic elite, mainstream commentary continues to helplessly spin its wheels in the mud of reductive, binary moralism. Critics routinely don a “white coat” of ethical superiority, fixating on what is ultimately the most superficial, laziest critique possible: tracing the source of the project’s funding to a sanctioned oligarch, debating the institutional parameters of consent, or obsessing over the flagrant transgression of the filming process. To dismiss DAU as a mere monument to oligarchic patronage or auteur despotism is not just an exercise in ethical self-satisfaction; it is a deliberate refusal of insight.

DAU demands an entirely different framework precisely because it dials the core topoi of contemporary participatory and immersive art up to their absolute maximum. The total, continuous extraction of affect, fears, tears and sex; the institutional curation of raw human behavior; and the relentless financialization of spontaneous life are not aberrations unique to Khrzhanovsky’s isolated set; they are the operational logic of contemporaneity itself.

To navigate this conceptual labyrinth, one must bypass the ethics of representation and instead interrogate the material and administrative coordinates of the machine Khrzhanovsky constructed on a massive, dynamic set in Kharkiv. From 1938 to 1968, the Institute functioned as a physically closed, self-sustaining simulation of a Soviet secret scientific facility, operating under a strict regime of total temporal immersion in which participants were stripped of contemporary objects. This ecosystem was populated not by professional actors reciting scripts, but by real-world figures placed into a highly stratified class hierarchy—ranging from world-renowned mathematicians like Dmitry Kaledin to Marina Marina Abramović and radical neo-Nazi youth. The entire apparatus operated under perpetual observation, resulting in over 700 hours of footage that initially fragmented into episodic features like DAU. Degeneration and DAU. Natasha (Silver Bear at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival in 2020), and finally culminated in the monumental Venice-winning epic about Lev Landau.

By hyper-focusing on the “unethical” nature of the film’s production, critics project the violence of extraction onto a distant artistic anomaly, safely pretending it isn’t happening to them. DAU shatters this illusion, forcing us to look directly under our own noses. It does not invite us to judge a simulated totalitarian state; it provides a distilled, hyper-real laboratory for realizing that we are already trapped inside a machine that systematically transforms our bodies, desires, and very subjectivities into an unresolvable resource for production.

I propose interpreting DAU as a quintessentially biopolitical project aimed not only at examining how power is implemented through a system of relations between people, but also at merging Art and Life. The Institute might be seen not only as a physical metaphor for the Soviet state, an “atheistic theocracy”[1] practicing a cult of science, but also as a space for realizing Khrzhanovsky’s method of “curating Life in a particular Institution”[2]. The Institute is a closed (one can enter only once), disciplinary (life within its walls is subject to strict guidelines), and rigorously hierarchical structure that accurately reproduces the class system. Khrzhanovsky scrupulously constructs a reality that has never existed. At the same time, we have to “recognize” it and accept the full compliance of the “copy” and the “original.”

DAU, as a project, does not aim to represent historical reality in detail, but to reconstruct specific power relations born and transformed over time. Yet this reconstruction is not merely representational; it is performative. Indeed, it functions as a biopolitical machine that not only represents totalitarianism but also reproduces its logic at the level of the project itself, expropriating its participants’ subjectivity and turning their lives into disposable material. In this sense, DAU prefigures the neoliberal present, where desire, spontaneity, and authenticity have become resources of production, though most prefer to ignore it.

Curating Life in a Particular Institution

Mathematician Dmitry Borisovich Kaledin, head of the Laboratory of Algebraic Geometry and its Applications at the Higher School of Economics[3], had been head of the “Laboratory of Mathematical Physics”[4] at DAU. Here is how he recalls the history of the Institute over the years:

I remember well, for example, the report of our young, infinitely talented employee A. I. Efimov on homological mirror symmetry for non-compact curves, read at the beginning of 1942, when the Institute was covered with sandbags protecting it from incendiary bombs, and there was only lend-lease stew and black bread at the buffet of the Institute[4].

According to Kaledin, scientists “could play any games under the favorable gaze of the Director”[4]. However, “the limits of asymptotic freedom might be discovered experimentally”[4]: colleagues of the mathematician faced repression; one was forced to leave the Institute, and the other “disappeared somewhere”[5]. Hypertrophied historicity—the heroes had been wearing “Soviet” outfits right down to their underwear, had been speaking “Soviet” language, had been eating “Soviet” food—is mixed with various kinds of frank props, mock-objects, replicas, and an argot mixing modern and “historical” lexicon.

“As an artist, I was interested in how far an idea could be taken, especially one that is on the face of it a contradiction in terms, ‘a recreation of something that was essentially chaos’”[6]—this is how British artist Jeremy Deller describes The Battle of Orgreave, a project aimed at “living” the historic event of 1984, when coal miners struck against coal exports. Former miners and policemen put on their clothes, trying to feel the spirit of the Ideological Civil War. Nevertheless, as Claire Bishop remarks, “these poles were managed through the imposition of a structure that had a tight conceptual kernel […] but allowed for formal laxity and improvisation, even while the ‘conditions of participation’ issued to the performers were fairly strict”[7].

This method of conducting chaos closely resembles Khrzhanovsky’s. Indeed, Khrzhanovsky masterfully exploits, consciously or unconsciously, all the topoi of participatory art: non-professional actors, transgressivity and the blurring of the line between Art and Life, and co-authorship. However, merely labeling DAU as “participatory art,” or more precisely “delegated performance”[8], would miss its most radical and unsettling dimension. Instead of the therapeutic “killing of the Soviet within oneself,” I propose to frame Chukhrov’s “stolen performance”[9] as a special case of “delegated performance.”

In Bishop’s framework, “delegated performance” implies a contractual transaction: the artist outsources authentic experience to performers, who then enact it on behalf of the audience. Authenticity, however mediated, remains their own—it is lent, performed, and returned. Chukhrov, by contrast, diagnoses DAU as “stolen performance.” That is why her distinction between “being” and “performing”[10] is central here: in delegated performance, the participant is hired to perform a self that remains external to them, a role they can “enter” and “exit.” Within the Institute, participants are not merely delegated a role to play; the project expropriates and re-engineers their very subjectivity, memory, and spontaneous lived temporalities into its totalizing, totalitarian machinery. Whether scientist, waitress, or chekist, they do not perform their Soviet selves; instead, they are compelled to inhabit a reality that retroactively claims their existence. Their authenticity is not outsourced; the DAU universe captures and reifies it. This theft transforms DAU from a mere historical reenactment into a biopolitical machine. Where delegated performance maintains distance between the performer and the performed (the actor knows they are acting), stolen performance collapses it. The participant becomes an indistinguishable part of Khrzhanovsky’s grand narrative. This is why the project’s violence is not merely representational (depicting Stalinist terror), but rather performative (enacting a form of symbolic expropriation on its own participants).

The synthetic nature of the project makes it similar to the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk)—I assume that this is the only definition that describes the essence of what had been lived and filmed; at the same time, the project exists in the modernist perspective of “a radical break with all that had existed before, a voluntarist revision of the unwritten laws of culture, the violent improvement of humanity”[11]—one of the participants of the filming, the artist Denis Tropashko, recalls: “It seems to me that Khrzhanovsky himself looks like Stalin at the end of his life, when he was a completely paranoid person”[12]. Things and rituals associated with them are the only factors that unite such different people. “Khrzhanovsky appears here as a kind of supervillain, […] who bought up all the barmaids, porn actresses and family dinner sets”[11] to build a life according to the rules of a closed institution. Thus, DAU reproduces itself as a machine of social mimesis. In this project, at least three temporalities have mixed—the Soviet one, the “present” time of shooting, and our contemporaneity—and DAU alternately appeals to each time. Russian families still store children’s sleds made of aluminum, wool coats lined with batting, mechanical hand mixers, floor lamps with lampshades (torchères), and other stuff in their mezzanined wardrobes. Moreover, they still live amid eclectic “sceneries” of imperial, early soviet and avant-garde, austere style, late constructivism and capitalist romanticism[13].

The tragedy of production

In the fifth part of DAU. Degeneration, the staff of the Institute, in front of invited foreign colleagues, conduct experiments on two-month-old babies to explore the potential for external interference in the work of the human brain at the earliest possible stage of its development: “disabling” the brain zone responsible for self-preservation would maximize the optimization of human life within the framework of building a fundamentally new society of perfect people. Biopolitical experiments were indeed carried out in the early USSR[14].

DAU. Degeneration (part 6) shows how Kaledin draws a curve of an economy’s exponential development based on a specific resource: knowledge. The graph of the potential development of the commodity economy, dependent on the extraction of natural resources and subject to periodic crises, represents a wave-like “growth-decline” curve, while the knowledge economy can be represented as an exponent that “goes to infinity, but in a finite time”[15], which means “there is some very specific date when, let’s say, well, the forecast according to our model, let’s say, the number of scientific articles […] or any other intellectual parameter […] becomes infinite”[15], Kaledin explains to Vladimir Azhippo, the investigative officer of the KGB. But when one variable tends to infinity, a mathematically verified model becomes unsuitable for accurate prediction. However, the potential limitlessness of knowledge expands the possibilities for developing better ways to extract it. Thus, Kaledin concludes, “the production of ideas, correctly and competently transferred inside the human brain, will be significantly more efficient than classical machine production—a properly constructed knowledge economy develops faster than classical capitalism”[4]. In the summer of 1956 he took the Director’s place; taking advantage of his position, Kaledin focused on exploration of the human brain—the confrontation between the USSR and capitalist economies “shifted from the roughly material sphere […] into the sphere of perception, into the sphere of ideas”[5]. Under modern neoliberal logic, everything considered a resource is evaluated exclusively in terms of economic benefits. If knowledge as an element of human capital is a resource on an equal basis with others, then homo oeconomicus, focused on increasing productivity, becomes the most important object of the Market in conditions when “production entirely moves to the field of the Spectacle, that is to say, to the human brain”[16].

DAU is full of metaphors drawn from physics. Kaledin writes in his Brief History of the Institute:

The quantum system remains truly quantum until no one has seen it. At the moment of observation, the wave function crashes, collapses, Schrödinger’s cat dies, and you win nothing; instead, you have a corpse in your hands. An observer should not step aside, interfere, or even observe. In theory, for the whole idea to make sense, there should be no physical observer[17].

That is why the Institute existed until the viewer could not physically interfere in the process—"according to the plan on November 8, 1968, all employees of the Institute, both scientific and additional personnel: security guards, janitors, cooks, waitress Vika from the buffet, as well as their family members, wives, children […] were beaten to death with axes and batons, and the Institute itself was destroyed”[18]. All that remains of the Institute are archival photographs, hundreds of hours of video and sound. In some sense, it disintegrated into atoms again, following physical laws, and could be reassembled anew each time it was viewed.

According to Gerald Raunig, Wagner, in his Art the Revolution, rushes “between cultural pessimism and revolutionary pathos”[19]: he laments the destruction of genuine, pure, and perfect art, Greek tragedy, while at the same time pinning his hopes on its revival through Revolution. In The Artwork of the Future (1849)[20], Wagner formulates the concept of a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), which, in his view, should return to the ideal of Greek tragedy by synthesizing previously divided arts into a single whole. Wagner, comparing the European art of the XIX century with the art of the Greeks, unequivocally concludes in favor of the latter: Greek art is universal, accessible to the whole demos, while modern art is available only to wealthy citizens; he puts forward the idea that the Greek himself was an actor, and a singer, and a dancer; he enjoyed the process, but not the result, thereby engaging in genuine art, and not a craft that involves payment for the final product.

The perfect ancient Greek tragedy died, according to Wagner, because Greek civilization, a priori, could not be a world of equals. The free Greek existed due to the existence of a slave, so sooner or later the hundreds of millions of people, randomly thrown within the borders of the Roman Empire, had to realize that all people had to be equally enslaved and unhappy, if they could not all be equally free and happy. In implementing the Wagnerian project, nations randomly thrown within the borders of the USSR felt the impossibility of inequality in an artificially created community of equals. Stalinist terror brought this tragedy to an end. In DAU, this manifested as a loop in which production and destruction are indistinguishable.

Le Mort Transformé le Vif

The Soviet project of life-building (“zhiznestroitelstvo”) shows how Life (both biologically and politically) became an object of the curating process long before such a practice formally emerged in contemporary art in the second half of the XX century. In his research, Alexey Penzin focuses on discussions in early Soviet avant-garde journals about “scientific management” and “scientific management of mental labor”[21]. I see these formulas as early examples of what Paolo Virno later called material and immaterial labor[22]. Predictably, Penzin concludes that the 1920s' life-building anticipates modern biopolitical concepts (Foucault’s biopower and Agamben’s state of emergency). But the most riveting point is that the theories and practices that realized early biopolitics “were invented at the grassroots, through the efforts of social movements and individual enthusiasts, intellectuals, artists and researchers”[21].

While the avant-garde is traditionally defined as opposition to Stalinist art—the former an initiative “from below,” the latter a leadership initiative—Boris Groys, in his famous work The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, polemically defines the Russian avant-garde as a forerunner of socialist realism. This is how Groys interprets the tension between these two artistic directions:

…the triumph of the avant-garde project in the early 1930s should have coincided with the avant-garde’s final defeat as an established artistic movement. There would have been no need to suppress the avant-garde if its black squares and transrational poetry had confined themselves to artistic space, but its persecution indicates it operated on the same territory as the state[23].

For that reason, Groys concludes, the VKP (b) Central Committee’s resolution (April 23, 1932) “On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations” abolished independent, chaotic art groups and transformed them into so-called creative unions built on a sectoral principle. Consequently, an artist became a worker on the production line; Socialism became the only viable work of art and a kind of binding state order. It is no exaggeration to say that it launched the process of Life production, in which Stalin performed the exceptional role of creator.

Socialist realism is a “dream realism”[24]; the line from “Aviamarch” of the 1920s (since 1933 it had been the official anthem of the USSR Air Force) expresses this well: “We were born to make the fairy tale come true.” But all that is expected to happen first needs to be painted with oil on canvas. Stalin’s political-aesthetic activity, the curation of Life, not only directly inherits the avant-garde “poetics of the demiurgic construction of the new world”[25], but also assimilates the modernist pathos of the early XX century; in the end, it all turned into violence.

Walter Benjamin[26] distinguished between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics. Communism was expected to oppose the right-wing aestheticization of politics by politicizing aesthetics on the left. But binary oppositions don’t fit here—not because they are outdated, but because the current neoliberal order is equally relevant in the vast majority of countries worldwide. Former socialist governments consolidated newly established power through language. Thoroughly ideologized, unambiguous, sterile, all-encompassing, and therefore safe and suitable for holding power, this specific language, however, required political correctness from those who were burdened with power—"the government also constantly had to excuse ideologically and prove that, for example, it followed the vanguard of historical progress”[27]. Thus “the government and the opposition had been operating on the same territory—the territory of linguistic, ideological legitimation”[27]. The idea of fighting on this territory collapses when confronted with capitalism, which speaks only one language—the language of profit. Today the neoliberal world has perfect knowledge of different dialects, including socially responsible ones.

In his research on the Ford Motor Company, Stefan Link shows how the myth of Ford’s bureaucratic machinery shaped the perception of the first mass assembly-line production as a highly organized, lifeless mechanism in which every movement and every moment of the worker’s time were over-regulated and regimented. Using the Ford workers’ direct discourse, Link shows that the plant’s workshops were very deregulated, chaotic, and many decisions were made ad hoc, not only by foremen or middle-level managers but by the workers themselves:

Foremen and supervisors uniformly recalled that improvements in machining and assembly emerged from constant trial and error and the collective expertise of the shop. Foremen would come up with suggestions for how to improve a particular assembly operation; machinists would devise ways of repurposing tools that had become worn down[28].

With a little imagination, can we not imagine this not as one of the first capitalist Modern Times, but as an experimental early Soviet socialist cooperative enterprise? It is the opposite of a lifeless mechanism; it is life itself performing. We have to disavow this simple contraposition and start to see how the capitalist science of productivity and effectiveness colonizes life, not by transforming it into a lifeless mechanism, but by assembling biological, social, and technological organisms into one productive combination.

An Observer versus The Observer

DAU, through its hypertrophied realism and scrupulous reconstruction of power, ultimately serves as a monumental allegory for this very logic of biopolitical production. Khrzhanovsky stages the present condition of homo oeconomicus, a figure who, whether in a Stalinist institute or a Fordist factory, is perpetually subjected to the imperatives of optimization. Yet, returning to Link’s revision of the Fordist myth, we see that power does not operate by turning life into a dead mechanism; instead, it thrives by harnessing life’s inherent chaos, improvisation, and collective expertise, turning them into production resources. The Institute in DAU, like the Soviet state itself and our present, is a machine that extracts value from both labor and life-as-performance (note that “performance” also means “production”), expropriates, and reifies it as a substrate for the industrial production of unique products.

DAU is thus not a document of the Soviet past; it is a prefiguration of the neoliberal present. When the system of extraction reaches its limit, the spectator must be eliminated, and the entire apparatus must be annihilated. Today, we are all participants in a DAU-tailored performance, spect-actors[29] who are expected to be stripped of any emancipatory potential. The participatory topoi that once promised agency—the crossing of thresholds, the collapse of stage and audience, the co-creation of meaning—have become banal, integrated into the very machinery they were meant to resist. Our thoughts, emotions, and bodies are extracted, optimized, and staged for a market that demands perpetual growth. The irony is that the Brazilian theorist and practitioner Augusto Boal introduced the concept of the spect-actor, who in turn appropriated Paulo Freire’s[30] ideas for theatre. His Theatre of the Oppressed was designed to break the monopoly of the director and the playwright, to transform passive reception into active co-creation, and to rehearse, within the space of fiction, the possibility of real social transformation. We gained participation without agency, co-creation without collectivity, emancipation without exit. That is why Claire Bishop, who once diagnosed the contradictions of the European social turn, has recently turned her gaze to Latin American art[31], as if searching for an alternative genealogy of participation, one that might resist that very machinery. DAU asks whether the spect-actor can ever truly step off the stage, or whether the stage has simply expanded to encompass everything, leaving us no outside from which to spectate, intervene, or escape.

Returning to Wagner. Tragedy requires someone who remains alive (“For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus”[32]). DAU leaves only participants, whose subjectivity is expropriated, and spectators, whose very appearance destroys the system. In this sense, Khrzhanovsky’s project reproduces not the structure of Greek tragedy accompanied by catharsis; instead, it reproduces the structure of neurosis: an event that cannot be processed into experience, that returns again and again, offering neither purification nor closure.

Yet the only position that remains possible—and necessary—is that of the External Observer. The Institute could exist only as long as no observer was physically present; it began to collapse the moment observation became possible. DAU demands an outside, even as it tries to absorb every outside into itself. In Greek tragedy, this inside-outside had a name: the messenger. The one who, while not participating in the catastrophe, saw it and returned to speak to the polis. The messenger was neither a hero nor a victim; he was the condition under which the polis could hear what it could not bear to see.

What kind of “outside” can really challenge the plot? In Agamben’s terms[33], the witness of the Shoah is not the survivor; it is the one who bears witness to the impossibility of bearing witness: the Muselmann who cannot speak and the survivor who speaks for him. DAU expropriates subjectivity from those inside, and leaves those outside unable to say what they have not lived; it does not create survivors, only expropriated participants; it does not create witnesses, only spectators whose gaze collapses the system. The Observer outside DAU is not a witness in Agamben’s sense, constituting instead a figure of pure exteriority—one who witnesses not trauma, but the structural impossibility of experience, demonstrating how this system was built to make witnessing impossible. Far from being a messenger or a witness in the full ethical sense, this is the observer who refuses to mistake his distance for knowledge. This outside is not a position of mastery; nonetheless, it is the only one from which the system can be seen as a system.