MAYA DEREN – STANO FILKO: Truth Has, In Reality, Never Been Ours

Truth Has, In Reality, Never Been Ours. Like a warning or a refusal, this title lodged itself in my thoughts as we stepped into the Kunstmuseum Bochum for the exhibition running from April 26 to September 21, 2025. What does it mean, today, to say that truth is not ours? Which truth are we talking about, historical, artistic, spiritual? And what kind of exhibition can grow from such a sharp, anti-definitive premise? The answer, or rather, the question that the exhibition echoes persistently, is not a narrative but an experience. A disjointed montage of forms, gestures, and visions that seeks resonance rather than resolution. At its center, two legendary figures, Stano Filko (1937–2015) and Maya Deren (1917–1961), who never met, yet now seem to study each other across time. Two parallel mythologies, two systems both closed and open at once.

For this occasion, the museum transforms into something alive, breathing. Nothing suggests a chronological order; you wander through the levels as though inside an expanded mind, where each room is a chamber of memory or a dream fragment. On the ground floor, Martin Vongrej creates a liminal zone between vision and thought. His works are subtle, nearly silent, asking not for interpretation but for presence. Words fall short; slow looking is enough. On the upper floor, Ibon Aranberri provides the counterpoint: steel, weight, sharp geometries. His sculptures, training relics from blacksmith apprentices, speak of form before function, of intention without outcome. His contribution is not a finished work but a study: an open-ended rehearsal of unrealized configurations. Both artists inhabit the exhibition not as backdrop, but as material to inscribe.

Within this context, Deren and Filko operate like magnetic poles. Maya Deren appears in incomplete film fragments from her Haitian journeys, notes, footage, unresolved questions. Her Haitian Footage Restoration Project traces a deep ethical dilemma: should one edit and complete what the artist never did? Show or protect? The curatorial choice embraces productive ambiguity: let the material speak for itself, as an inquiry left open but not silent. Deren moves through rituals not as an observer, but as a medium. Her cinema, which since the 1940s wove time, dance, and dreams, becomes here a site of tension and waiting, a form of doubt rather than film.

Filko, in contrast, overwhelms with the weight of his cosmology. System SF, his theoretical and spiritual framework, is neither theory nor visual art, but a multidimensional map of being. Three domains: Biology (3.D), Cosmology (4.D), Ontology (5.D). A symbolic ascent from the senses to pure spirit. All of it encoded in colors, numbers, chakras, recycled materials. His archive becomes organism, his body both temple and studio. His works are not objects, but time-devices. In his video-performances, especially Performance in the White, he appears as a postmodern shaman, clad in white, embodying the 5.D dimension: an uptime reality beyond time, ontological, absolute.

This urge toward transcendence was never neutral. Filko’s project was born of historical pressure: creating under totalitarian rule in Eastern Europe. Where institutions collapsed, he built his own, Archiv SF. House, studio, cosmology merged. He cut, plasticized, redated, and annotated his works in a continuous gesture of self-mythology. Nothing was final; everything was rewritable. His greatest work was not visible, it was life, transfigured.

In this light, his dialogue with Deren becomes a generative short-circuit. She too moved through territories of ritual, displacement, and altered states of consciousness. Escaping pogroms in Kyiv and living as an outsider in the U.S., Maya embodied a migratory spirituality, rootless yet porous. Her films—from Meshes of the Afternoon onward, were already dream-structures. The Haitian documentation is her most fragile, and perhaps her most political. Her gaze is not anthropological but poetic, and for that reason, deeply ethical.

At the edges, but far from marginal, is the documentary Happsoc by Kveto Hečko. It shows Filko in motion, alive, in his studio-temple. We hear him say: “I don’t create. It is my inner fanatic duty.” These words reverberate through the exhibition’s atmosphere. The stakes here are not aesthetics, but spiritual survival. Art is not decoration, nor provocation, it’s salvation, a cosmic archive, a mechanism for reincarnation.

You don’t leave this exhibition, you emerge from it. It lingers like a faint scent, perhaps from Filko’s transparent folders, or an imagined waft of Haitian incense. You find yourself standing silent before a white wall, thinking: maybe that’s it. Truth has, in reality, never been ours. But for a moment, we are allowed to inhabit it.