2020, site-specific installation, built for the Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg consisting of single-channel video dark matter, 4K video, 19’52”, colour, sound; an artist’s book imperial objects, 132 pages, 24 × 17 cm, thread-stitched hardcover; two glass showcases; trapezoidal sheet metal; objects and research material

imperial machine is a site specific installation of trapezoidal sheet metal, raised inside the Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg. Its square footprint and its height follow the silhouette of a headframe, the clad tower that stands over a mine shaft and holds the hoist that lowers the crews underground. Inside the structure a single projection travels down into an open diamond pit in the Republic of Sakha, eastern Siberia. Two glass showcases stand in the room at table height, a glass hood on slim metal legs, lit by one strip light on the wall. They hold papers, postcards, souvenirs, sorting tools and a small bust of Stalin. An artist’s book lies open at their edge.

Edit Molnár and Marcel Schwierin, curators, on the exhibition Possessed Landscapes, Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg, 2020.

At the centre of Possessed Landscapes stands a new commission by the German-Uzbek artist Viktor Brim, a research into the “Mir” diamond mine, one of the largest in the world, in the Russian republic of Yakutia. Brim’s imperial machine (2020) examines the continuities between the resource politics of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin, above all through the “Mir” mine and with a view to the colonial strategies of the two regimes. Brim’s work comprises a film made on site, a site-specific architectural installation, a new publication on his archival research into Soviet and Russian rhetoric, and a selection of further materials.

imperial machine is built from trapezoidal sheet metal, the ribbed steel cladding used across industrial sites because it is cheap, light to carry and weatherproof. The sheet is rolled into a run of flat-topped ridges and screwed onto a frame, and the screw heads stay visible in rows. In the diamond field of the Republic of Sakha in eastern Siberia the same sheeting covers the processing plants, the vehicle sheds and the headframes, the clad towers that stand over the shafts, carry the winding gear and can be seen across a pit field from far off. It is also the standard material of the site fence, put up around anything being built or torn down. In the exhibition hall in Oldenburg the sheeting is raised into a square room with high sides that visitors walk into, set around the visitor at the scale of a body.

In a deep mine the crews do not climb down, they ride. Under the headframe, the tower over the shaft, hangs the cage: a steel box on a rope that carries miners and equipment down at the start of a shift and back up at its end. The rope runs from a winding drum in a house beside the tower, up over wheels at the top of the headframe, and down the shaft. A second vessel, the skip, brings up the rock, so that people and rock travel the same shaft in separate boxes. The cage has no windows, and for the length of the descent its walls are the whole built space around the body. The sheet metal room of imperial machine puts the visitor in that position: a square metal enclosure, entered through an opening. The enclosure does not move. The downward travel runs on the screen, where the image sinks into an open pit and ends in the dark.

Two booklets lie one below the other in the showcases of imperial machine, flat under a single strip light. The upper one is a work record book, grey, with the state emblem in gold, an unused blank printed by the state printer Goznak in 2003. Below it lies a retirement certificate, red, with the same emblem and noticeably smaller. The two follow one another through a life: one is filled while a person works, the other issued when the working years end. The Soviet form of the same book, the trudovaya knizhka, was brought in by a decree of 20 December 1938 and issued from 15 January 1939 in one design for every industry and state office across the USSR. An employer held it for as long as a person worked there and handed it over on dismissal, with the reason for leaving written in. Its entries proved the length of service on which a pension was calculated. Retirement certificates stopped being issued on 1 January 2015, and the electronic work record took effect on 1 January 2020.

The postcards in the showcases of imperial machine are shop goods from Mirny, the town at the Mir diamond pit, and their backs name what the fronts show: the mining and processing plant of the Mir mine, a branch of Sberbank, the transport of diamond ore, the Vilyui Ring memorial to the discoverers, geologists and pioneers. Beside them lie three refrigerator magnets. Two carry the line “Mirny, capital of the diamond region”, one over a view down into the open pit with the town on the horizon, the other over two cupped hands full of rough stones. The third shows a choron, the carved Sakha cup from which fermented mare’s milk is drunk at the summer festival, filled with rough diamonds and standing between the flag of the Russian Federation and the flag of the Republic of Sakha, under the line “Diamonds of Yakutia, the treasure of Russia”. A small bronze bear stands next to them.

Printed pages from a yearbook of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) lie in the showcases of imperial machine, laid out as grids of small photographs. They show veterans with rows of medals on their chests, ranks of cadets, a mounted formation, officials handing over flowers, the flag of the Russian Federation, and fireworks above a war memorial. One page runs a crowd that fills a city street and carries photographs held up on boards. That is the Immortal Regiment, a march held on 9 May, in which people carry portraits of relatives who served in the Second World War. 9 May is Victory Day, the public holiday that marks the German capitulation of 1945 and carries the largest state ceremony of the Russian year. The march began in Tomsk in 2012, where journalists brought around six thousand people onto the street with two thousand portraits, and by 2015 it had been taken into the official Victory Day programme in Moscow (RFE/RL 2017; CEPA 2025). The yearbook sets these pages next to its account of the republic’s economy.

An in-house magazine of ALROSA, the state diamond company, lies open in the showcases of imperial machine at its winter 2019 issue, pages 56 and 57. The spread is headed Pathfinder and introduces three young employees of the company, a geologist, an ecologist and a chemist, who say why they chose their subjects. They are photographed together against a night sky with northern lights over a mountain range, beside a stack of oversized cut diamonds. Next to it lies Vestnik, the company newspaper, which reports drilling technology, management forums and meetings between the company’s chief executive and the head of state. A company brochure is laid out beside them, its pages built as film strips with sprocket holes, each frame a photograph of a pit under the company logo, and the captions tell the founding of the diamond field in the company’s own words.

A pair of magnifying glasses lies in the showcases of imperial machine, a white plastic frame with a small lamp at the bridge and a lens that swings down in front of one eye. Beside it lie fine pointed tweezers, a scatter of clear imitation stones and a single rough quartz crystal. These are the instruments of sorting. Rough diamonds are looked at one stone at a time, held in the tweezers so that no finger covers a face, and turned under the lens and the lamp until the whole surface has been seen. The lens a jeweller uses magnifies ten times. By hand the stones are separated by size, shape, colour and clarity. A rough diamond has a dull, greasy surface and almost none of the brilliance of a cut stone, and what the lens looks for is the crystal shape under it.

The bust in the showcases of imperial machine is a small white head and shoulders of Stalin in a military tunic, on a square plinth, the size kept on a desk. A full-size bust stands in Mirny, unveiled on 8 May 2005 during the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet victory, in a stand of trees beside the square named for the thirtieth anniversary of that same victory, facing the Holy Trinity church. The town veterans’ council had asked for it and raised the money, and gold letters on the plinth address Stalin as supreme commander of the armed forces of the USSR. It was the first Stalin monument in post-Soviet Russia unveiled with the leadership of the republic in attendance. One of the postcards in the same showcase carries the church, the victory obelisk and the Stalin monument on a single card. Monuments arrived in quantity that year, among them a new Lenin on the main square; 2005 was also the fiftieth year of the diamond industry there.

imperial machine was produced in 2019 with a media art grant of the Stiftung Niedersachsen, awarded by the Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg for the production of a new work and tied to a residency in the city. It was shown there in the international group exhibition Possessed Landscapes, curated by Edit Molnár and Marcel Schwierin, from 30 January to 29 March 2020, alongside work by Tanja Engelberts, Rachel O’Reilly, Zina Saro-Wiwa and Zhou Tao.