Adam Frelin

The Faction

single-channel video
2-minute and 13-minute versions
2007

In 2007 I was invited by L.A. art organization, Outpost for Contemporary Art, to create a new project in the Ukraine. Having discovered that the Ukrainian president had his own private marching band, I wanted to use them as part of my project. Rather than work with the entire band, I pulled out a faction of members, a brass quintet, that I filmed throughout the capital of Kiev. From old soviet vestiges to new capitalist undertakings, they wandered through transitional spaces of their city continually playing the same song. In an act of both support and defiance, individualism and conformity, the band marched in their accustomed manner deliberately oblivious of the social and political change surrounding them.