Looping Swans is a single-channel video installation distributed across 12 daisy-chained CRT televisions in a circular staging, paired with a durational performance by Maya Gurantz. The work is staged against the August 19, 1991, Soviet coup, when state television replaced news with a continuous loop of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake — a broadcast designed to keep citizens from seeing the tanks rolling into Moscow.¹

The video isolates the “Danse des Petits Cygnes” (Dance of the Little Swans) — 4 dancers executing one of ballet's hardest sequences while making it appear effortless.

At the center of the installation, Gurantz and performers hammer rebar from ladders, threading fabric through the structure as it grows higher. Viewers must walk around it to see the TV screens. What state spectacle conceals through beauty, the hammering insists upon through noise — and what the broadcast asks viewers to see directly, the structure forces them to see around.