Dimitri Venkov is a visual artist and filmmaker whose works deal with the historical and political landscape of Russia and beyond. His distinct, even idiosyncratic approach to making films is reflexive of well-established image-making genres, from documentary to science-fiction, all-the-while possessing a certain poetics and poignancy. Each work is the result of long-term research processes, leading each time to films with distinct personalities. Yet we can see ongoing concerns, such as those to do with the effect of politics and ideology on society, and of existence in the modern city including at the level of the individual. For his solo exhibition at M HKA, Venkov presents four films from recent years that form a kind of ‘quatryptich’. They are conceptually linked through the idea of what Venkov describes as a “reduction of the means of expression”, referring to a progression from the intricate narrative of the earlier works to the paired-down musical structure of the later ones.