#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The main Norilsk venue of the 10th all-Russian action Night of Arts was the art gallery of the Norilsk museum – 445 northerners visited the event.
This year’s action was based on the project of the St. Petersburg artist Natasha Shalina I am Going to Look for You – one of the best Russian exhibitions of this year, according to the national award Museum Olympus.
“It is a great joy to host Natasha Shalina’s exhibition in Norilsk”, said Natalya Fedyanina, the Norilsk museum director, at the opening. “Only six projects from all over the country made it to the top of the Museum Olympus in the Exhibition category, and I am Going to Look for You is the only art project in this group. This is a wonderful gift to all of us on the Arts Night, and we thank Natasha, who is with us today, and her husband, artist Igor Tishin, who helped with the installation. It was quite a difficult story to assemble – in every sense: we delivered the exhibition in parts, the wood was transported in the summer on a barge along the Yenisey, and some things were delivered by plane”.
I am Going to Look for You is a complex, multi-layered exhibition, and at the same time close and understandable to many. The items for the touching collection were gathered over almost five years – at flea markets in different countries, among family albums and relics. This is a memory project in which the artist acts as an archivist and invites to a deep internal search – through multiple associations that involuntarily arise when the viewer interacts with each of the exhibits.
Initially, I am Going to Look for You is a story-installation about the fate of a woman, but Norilsk viewers were offered to look at the idea from the point of view of any person: how he searches for himself, his roots, perceives the history of his family and his own personality in the context of a social group, a country, everything human.
“For me, existential experiences are important first of all as a personal history of existence, in which life values are understood”, explains Natasha Shalina. “This whole story is a way of coming to terms with existence, continuously listening to life, achieving spiritual awakening and overcoming anxiety. I started from the history of my family, very complex and tragic at certain times, having gone through repression, and drew a parallel with many families from different parts of Russia and the world”.
Through old photographs and objects, the artist draws many threads from the past to the present, making the conventionally alien – her own: in the archetypal exhibits, everyone will find something personal, relating them to themselves, because we all ‘come from the same forest’. Actually, the forest as a symbol of the family tree, roots, Russian rituals is represented at the exhibition by a dozen real birches and poplars.
The artist thanked the Norilsk museum’s team for their painstaking and pedantic approach to creating the exhibition:
“In relation to the exhibition, I am a complex person, I like it when everything is in its place, I don’t want to move or remove anything. In this sense, the Norilsk museum’s team is ideal for cooperation, and I say many thanks to the museum for the support and attention to my art and a ton of thanks to you, dear visitors, guests, participants in my project. Because the project is open, and all these months, while the exhibition is in these halls, you will create together with me – invade my project, discover something new for me from your view, emotions, messages, for me it is very important”.
The phrase from a children’s counting rhyme – I am Going to Look for You – set the tone not only for the central project, but also for the entire program of the Arts Night, for which the Norilsk Museum chose another line from children’s folklore – Who will You Be?
The theme of the tree, roots, and the search for oneself was continued by another forest – a metaphorical one, depicted in paintings from the art collection of the Norilsk museum. This exhibition was presented in the permanent exhibition hall. Its name – I Came out of the Forest – is also a metaphor and a hint at a common cultural memory: even those who have forgotten Nekrasov’s poem in its entirety since school years know this quote.
In the same hall, master classes were held: gallery guests made candlesticks from glass and branches, painted stones, made textile brooches and trees from moss and stones. Here, they also jointly created a symbolic city tree – they decorated it with foliage, and wrote something about themselves on each leaf.
The most passionate and inquisitive were waiting for another interactive activity – cards with tasks, and not only art history ones. In order to finally answer the question: Who will You Be? – it was necessary to thoughtfully go around all the Arts Night locations.
Earlier, the Norilsk Museum hosted an exhibition about the Norillag prisoner Euphrosinia Kersnovskaya’s gardens.
Follow us on Telegram, VKontakte.
Text: Anzhelika Stepanova, Photo: Ekaterina Vyshinskaya and Alexander Gorbarchuk
