The work of German-Japanese artist Koto Ezawa depicts iconic moments from art history, film, photography and popular culture, re-conceiving them as animated videos, slide projections, light boxes, and prints. With Odessa Staircase Redux, he translates the famous sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film Battleship Potemkin into a series of ink wash drawings, each one made from the first frame of every cut. The drawings are presented as full-bleed reproductions in this thick, small-format artist’s book that can be read as a jumpy narrative flip-book or more slowly as a progression of powerful images that still resonate as an illustration of imperialist power gone terribly awry. Each softbound book comes with a 16 page “bonus” booklet, consisting of photographic images of more contemporary political demonstrations being quelled.
