Girl in Red

Lisokot adopts the format of a poetic audio diary to reconstruct episodes from the life of Dina Vierny related to her participation in the French Resistance.

Dina Vierny (1919–2009) was a French art dealer and patron of the arts of Jewish descent, the muse of Aristide Maillol, a friend, model, and collector of many twentieth-century artists, from Henri Matisse to Ilya Kabakov. During World War II, Vierny worked with the Marseille network run by journalist Varian Fry to help Jews and political refugees flee the Nazi occupation across the French-Spanish border. These anti-fascist activists, persecuted intellectuals, and «degenerate» artists included Hannah Arendt, André Breton, and Marcel Duchamp. Vierny helped the fugitives with papers and guided them through the Pyrenees by secret paths. She did not give them her name and was remembered as the girl in the red dress, which served as an identifying sign.

Lisokot reconstructs this period drawing on Vierny’s recollections in the book The Story of My Life as told to Alain Jaubert, framing them with a performance of the «Workers’ Marseillaise» and the Russian ballad «And You Are Laughing.» The latter is famous thanks to the album Blatnye pesni, a collection of Soviet prison camp songs that Vierny smuggled across a different border. After the war she visited dissident and non-conformist artists in Moscow and also collected and studied prison folklore, which she recorded in France in 1975.

Cover image: Aristide Maillol, Girl in Red (Portrait of Dina Vierny), 1940. Image processed by a neural network

About the Artist

Varya Pavlova (Lisokot) is a singer, composer, and poet. She works at the intersection of experimental electronic music and performance art, using her voice as her main instrument. She often works with the Soviet song heritage, deconstructing and rethinking it. She creates site-specific performances with unique sets, costumes, and poetic texts. She participated in the 1st Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA1) and the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz) and has performed in the Berlin clubs Berghain and Funkhaus.