Rachel Monosov
It’s All Written In the Stars, 2020

It’s All Written In The Stars has short film at its core. With elements of science fiction and autobiography, the Monosov sisters, Rachel and Maria, who wrote, directed, and starred in the video work, return to their childhood home. The long journey is intercepted with possible memories of a forgotten girlhood in Bukova, a small village in the Zelenchukskiy province of Russia. This remote town burgeoned around the Special Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), home to what was for several years the world’s largest single primary mirror optical reflecting telescope. To return in 2019 is an experience of going back in time, to a place where time appears to have stopped upon the collapse of the USSR in 1989. It’s All Written In The Stars slowly reveals complicated social etiquettes and unsettling agendas. As the estranged sisters try to reconstruct a forgotten past, fragments of memory offer possible utopian futures.

Dys(U)topian philosophies come as no surprise in today’s world. We live in a time when the uncertainty of our future is part of our daily state. We spend billions developing the potential for living on Mars. The film emphasizes our ecosystem’s loneliness, isolation, and the search for other plants as possible solutions to our own existence.

It’s All Written In The Stars is a story about migration in the broader sense of the word. We are not just talking about moving from one location to another, from one planet to another, but moving inside oneself, into different layers of the inner world. But, like astronomy tries to study the universe from one point on our small planet, the heroes of this film try to explore their universe from one point: the space and time in which they are NOW. These attempts at understanding their true identity, at reconnecting, are revealed to be futile movements inside a closed location, unable to offer confirmation of the sisters’ existence.

As the film connects phenomena in the cosmos to different layers of the inner world, the concept returns to physicality, expanding to the displacement of people on Earth. It is typical of Rachel Monosov’s work to move from autobiographical footnotes, to large socio-political and historical events. The sisters’ father, who emigrated from Russia to Israel in 1990, becomes but one of the millions of immigrants, refugees and stateless people living today.

The work is accompanied by a publication incuding interviews with prominent astronomers R. Brent Tully, Bruce Elmegreen, and Olga Silchenko.

Partnered with

Rachel Monosov in collaboration with Maria Monosov
It’s All Written in the Stars, 2020
4K color. 27min
Edition of 3

Stills from It’s All Written in the Stars

Rachel Monosov
Self-Portrait with Sister Maria upon first return to Russia since 1991_1 and _2, 2020
archival pigment print + artist frame, 28 × 38 cm (11 × 15 in) each

Rachel Monosov
I can’t see the air, 2020
brass and candles
20 × 13 × 30 cm (8 × 5 × 12 in)
Edition of 2

I can’t see the air is a poignant brass face, its nose broken. It presents critical links to racism and violence. While the nose is the first to break during an act of violence, it is also the characteristic often used to differentiate White Europeans from Jews and Blacks.

Rachel Monosov
Don’t step on my freedom_3, 2020
Aluminum (Unique)
19 × 4 × 1 cm (7.5 × 1.5 × .5 in)

Rachel Monosov
Don’t step on my freedom _4, 2020
Aluminum (Unique)
20 × 7 × 1 cm (8 × 3 × .5 in)

Rachel Monosov
Don’t step on my freedom_1, 2020
Aluminum (Unique)
19 × 4 × 1 cm (7.5 × 1.5 × .5 in)

Rachel Monosov
Don’t step on my freedom _2, 2020
Aluminum (Unique)
20 × 7 × 1 cm (8 × 3 × .5 in)

Rachel Monosov
A little man lifted into the sky by a green light, and never returning to this place, 2020
archival pigment print mounted on aluminum, neon + cable, 79 × 119 × 3 cm (31 x 47 × 1 in)
Edition of 5

A little man lifted into the sky by a green light, and never returning to this place, 2020
Installation Galeria Catinca Tabacaru, Bucharest

Rachel Monosov
Doorknob in Hermitage, 2020
3D-printed plated steel, acrylic jewels (door knobs are functional)
15 × 6 cm (6 × 2.5 in) (x2)
Edition of 5

“When I saw this object I did not see the beauty I saw power, I imagined it as a big bird flying around earth and trying to stick its nails to earth and shake it, I was looking at the sky to search for her nights after that day in the Hermitage”

Rachel Monosov
Doorknob in Hermitage, 2020
3D-printed plated steel, acrylic jewels, and 100+ year old Romanian door from Bucovina
168 × 85 cm (66 × 33.5 in) (Unique)

The handle is a replica of a set of door knobs used as functional, decorative objects inside the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The original symbology references the feet of the eagle on the 17th century Tsar’s flag. Displacing these objects from their original context bestows upon them different meanings, including a kitschiness representing a long gone mother Russia, which speaks to the artist’s immigration story in 1990 after the fall of the USSR.

Here, the door knobs, attached to a 100+ year old Romanian door from Bucovina, on the border of Ukraine (previously part of the USSR), speak to the connections between the communist histories of Russia and Romania, rising questions about the influence of communism.

In addition, Monosov’s use of 3D-printing to re-create the object renders it “cheap” and reduces the value of hierarchy, and potentially royalty.