Sisters Alike
Female Identities in the Post-Utopian
Lene Markusen

Lene Markusen first visited St. Petersburg in 1993. With only a very rudimentary knowledge of Russian, she made drawings of the women she observed in the urban environment. Both of her films GRAD (2004) and Sankt – Female Identities in the Post-Utopian (2017) are set in St. Petersburg (Sankt Petersburg in Russian) or the former LeninGRAD. They revolve around a female perspective on the post-socialist transformation and the societal and political changes that took place after the fall of the Iron Curtain. They deal with what these upheavals mean for the lives of individual women. Through drawings, film stills, and excerpts from the film scripts Lene Markusen offers a subjective, temporal narrative, delineating the living conditions, contemporary and historical figures of women, and the construction of female identities in relation to the former so-called “East” and “West”.