Terror Element - Anna Engelhardt & Mark Cinkevich

Terror Element is a hybrid documentary set in a modern-day crime lab that explores how images of science are weaponised to project state power. Nina, a reclusive forensic expert, uncovers a videotape about a notorious series of explosions across Russia in 1999. Combining digital reconstructions and archival material, the film examines the contradictory statements presented by authorities to justify the second invasion of Chechnya, in a pivotal year in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. Drawn into the grainy television footage, Nina tries to understand how crime labs became tools in this cryptic powerplay. Slowly, her laboratory begins to resemble the televised one.

Reconstructing the CGI environment of the film within the gallery space, the installation mirrors the protagonist reviewing archival footage as evidence. There are three main elements.

A CRT TV displaying the film. The model is almost identical to the one used by the protagonist within the CGI environment of the film.
A laboratory stage set featuring key props from the film, including an explosive detection kit, lab vials, and a metal tray. The kit, which the protagonist shows in a filmed interview, is a spray developed and sold globally to forensic labs and security agencies to test for the presence of explosives. It is the same model as those employed during the investigation of the 1999 Russian apartment bombings, which remain in use today. The exact model was determined during the artists’ investigative research for the film, and presents key evidence of the project.

An HDV camcorder records the stage set in real time, allowing visitors to view the scene through the camera’s LCD preview screen. This dual perspective allows viewers to see both the raw, constructed stage set in the gallery space and the “authentic” output of cinematic production.

Terror Element. 2025. Single-channel video, colour, sound, 25 min; television, camera, speakers, briefcase, explosive detection spray, laboratory tables. Dimensions variable.

About the artists

Anna Engelhardt is a video artist and writer based in London, working with video installation, computer-generated animation, and archival research.  

Her films follow semi-fictional characters caught in environments of political conflict. The subjects draw from her investigations into contested histories of technology, extraction, occupation, and dispossession. Since official documentation of political violence is often censored or staged, her works use fiction as an instrument of narration.  

Her research draws on her MA in Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, London, and relies on methods ranging from satellite imagery analysis to interviews conducted on site. This method has developed through a sequence of commissions, most recently Cues for Film and Video Umbrella (2026) and a new work for her upcoming solo exhibition at Gasworks, London (2027). Her work has been shown at the ICA, London; HKW, Berlin; the Kyiv Biennial; and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, among others. She has published essays for e-flux, The Funambulist, Spector Books, and Duke University Press. 

machinic.info

Mark Cinkevich is a researcher and artist whose work explores how infrastructures and visual technologies organize power.  

Focusing on social and infrastructural landscapes, he examines how surveillance, logistics, and extraction shape environments of control. In his artistic practice, he is interested in critical and speculative aspects of art that operate at the intersection of fact and fiction.  

His works have been presented internationally, including at transmediale (Berlin), steirischer herbst (Graz), BFI London Film Festival, Ars Electronica (Linz), the Lithuanian National Gallery of Art (Vilnius), and Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art (Ljubljana), among others. 

@m_cinkevich

Terror Element is part of the exhibition The Mechanics of Truth, within the LAB 5 program curated by Bani Brusadin.