#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The exhibition of the Polar Art residence resident Elena Skripkina – The Snow Queen’s Approaching – was a beautiful conclusion to the three-day RE-Museum laboratory, which brought together experts from different cities of the country at the sites of the Norilsk museum.
The vernissage took place on the landing stage of the former Trade House building, where AMMA – the Arctic museum of modern art – will be created. The Norilsk version of the exhibition, according to Elena Skripkina’s plan, was originally destined to become a ‘moment of life’.
“I don’t want to seem overly sentimental, but I have special feelings associated with Norilsk and Taimyr”, the author said at the vernissage. “The biggest event of this year was the trip to Dudinka to watch the ice drift. I wrote the music you heard when you entered. There are sounds inside this music that reflect the buoyancy of ice, underwater sound.
You see X-ray images of the Yenisey ice and fragments of my book, which will be published literally in a month – the lines repeat the contours of the Yenisey ice. The blue mountain ranges of the Putorana plateau, which I am trying to print on glass through the ice, become clearer and literally melt, and everything quickly changes. This is about continuous formation here. There are no cause-and-effect relationships and laws that I am accustomed to, but there is this transience and at the same time temporality stretched out in time”.
According to the Norilsk museum, The Snow Queen’s Approach is a prologue to Elena Skripkina’s future exhibition, which will be held during the New Year holidays in Moscow, and part of the Artist’s Sound Book being prepared for release by VAC publishing house. This is media art, where the memory of a place and time in different parts of Russia is voiced with the help of specially written music and accompanied by a documentary story from photographs, clippings from periodicals, drawings. Norilsk with its icy landscape will become a separate chapter in it.
At the opening of the exhibition, which became the epilogue of the RE-Museum, Natalia Fedyanina, the Norilsk museum director, noted: “Such a strange place as Norilsk is a real Klondike for a person with artistic thinking. Lena works with memory, with difficult meanings. Therefore, it seemed appropriate to offer her an old landing stage for the implementation of an art project, disappearing in the future AMMA museum together with the function and building of the shopping center, reborn into a place of art”.
The Snow Queen’s Approaching author called the site provided by the museum the best space for her exhibition. According to her, the theme would not have sounded so harmoniously in any other place, and this is only “just the beginning of her deep romance with Norilsk meanings”.
Earlier, we told about the launch of the RE-Museum museum design laboratory on Leninsky, 14, the discussion of museum transformations and the creation of a museum from scratch.
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Text: Varvara Sosnovskaya, Photo: Nikolay Shchipko and the Norilsk museum
