Roman Charity, 2025

HD video, 19’27”

The work was made as a visual part of Alena Tereshko Master’s degree, and it was exhibited in Kuvan Kevat / exhibition of MFA students in the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki in spring 2025. Roman Charity is an idiom that circulated in Latin texts and appeared for the first time in relation to the story of antique character Cimon. According to the ancient historians he was imprisoned and because he suffered from starvation his daughter Pero visited and breastfeed him to save his life. This loving act of “filial piety” was appreciated by authorities as evidence that Cimon raised a good person and that’s why could be forgiven. For contemporary social norms this plot seems rather awkward cause the hint to the forbiddingly close relations between farther and daughter, but its transgressive tension between taboo and compassion inspired artists of different epochs. The project by Alena Tereshko has been developed as an interpretation of the chef-d’oeuvre Roman Charity by Peter Paul Rubens which belongs to the State Hermitage Museum collection. The artwork consists of two parts: a painting and a film essay. The picture is a recreation of a Baroque masterpiece from the perspective of the female model in the painting. The film essay intertwines the stories of Cimon and Pero, the biography of an artist and a politician P. P. Rubens, the image of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg incorporated both in representation of the Russian state power and international art history. In the video all these subjects are echoed in fragmented intimate autobiographical narrative by Tereshko. This project is part of the ongoing Why F series, in which she creates her own collection of “fraudulent works of art” using feminist approaches to reinterpret masterpieces of the past.