This project is a video that contrasts the Suprematist works of Kazimir Malevich with the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism. In 1915/1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. Malevich exhibited his first "Black Square" at the "Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10" in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) in 1915. A black square placed against the sun appeared for the first time in the 1913 scenery designs for the Futurist opera, "Victory over the Sun".

After the October Revolution (1917), Malevich became a member of the Collegium on the Arts of Narkompros, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments and the Museums Commission (all from 1918/1919). He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in the USSR (now part of Belarus) (1919/1922), the Leningrad Academy of Arts (1922/1927), the Kiev State Art Institute (1927/1929), and the House of the Arts in Leningrad (1930). He wrote the book, The World as Non-Objectivity, which was published in Munich in 1926 and translated into English in 1959. In it, he outlines his Suprematist theories.

In 1923, Malevich was appointed director of Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture. He painted his "Black Cross" the same year. The institute was forced to close in 1926 after a Communist party newspaper called it "a government-supported monastery" rife with "counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery." The Soviet state was by then heavily promoting a politically sustainable style of art called Socialist Realism - a style Malevich had spent his entire career repudiating.

Malevich's assumption that a shifting in the attitudes of the Soviet authorities toward the modernist art movement would take place after the death of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky's fall from power was proven correct in a couple of years, when the Stalinist regime turned against forms of abstraction, considering them a type of "bourgeois" art, that could not express social realities. As a consequence, many of his works were confiscated and he was banned from creating and exhibiting similar art.

Critics derided Malevich's art as "a negation of everything good and pure: love of life and love of nature." The Westernizer artist and art historian Alexandre Benois was one such critic. Malevich responded that art can advance and develop for art's sake alone, saying that "Art does not need us, and it never did". (Wp)