#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. With the help of new technologies, the paintings of the artist Boris Molchanov, the real son of the Dolgan people, now come to life before the eyes of museum visitors in Dudinka.
The multimedia project Revived Legends of the North was the first to digitize the works of the gifted Dolgan artist. The audience called the project unique from a cultural, aesthetic and even therapeutic point of view. The event took place as part of the Under the same sky: Full Immersion festival, which was held from 4 to 8 October at the sites of the Taimyr Museum of Local Lore in honor of its 85th anniversary.
In his paintings – graphic, leather, pictorial – Boris Molchanov talked about his native places where he spent his childhood, he tried to recall the details of nomadic life, signs, tundra customs and laws, which should definitely be observed.
In total, 15 watercolor works by the artist were set in motion. Thus, not just paintings got a second life, but the testimonies of a great master about the Dolgan people legends and traditions.
There are no analogues of the project on the peninsula, in which the image from the canvas would come to life and the painted fragments and details would come into motion – figures of people and animals, clouds, plants, grass, fire smoke. The multimedia version was created over the course of a year in several stages: first, art historians from the Stroganov Academy were engaged in classical restoration, then there was a long process of digitizing the paintings in Perm.
The representative of the organization where the final stage of the transformation was carried out, the manager of Vinci Interactive LLC (Perm), Anastasia Demyanova, said that initially the duration of the animation work was less. But later, they decided to prolong it: from a simple video, the film turned into a 15-minute exposition, with which you can even dream or meditate.
Olga Korneyeva, the Taimyr Museum former director, conceived and started this team project. According to her, such names as Molchanov are the property of Taimyr, they form the cultural values of our region, make up its glory:
“In his short life, Molchanov was able to go from the son of a nomadic hunter to a professional innovative artist, found his own unique visual language, creating a new genre of art – paintings from rovduga (the deer skin), which have no analogues anywhere on earth”.
They say that in his youth his paintings were bright, joyful, promising hope. In recent years, as the Dudinka writer and researcher Valentina Zavarzina wrote in the book Leather Worlds of Boris Molchanov, there was more and more sadness in him, a feeling of loneliness, aching melancholy:
“He set the viewer not to admire the landscapes, but to reflect on the course of life”.
The Boris Molchanov’s revived paintings multimedia exhibition opening was the highlight of the festival dedicated to the Taimyr Museum of Local Lore’s 85th anniversary.
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Text: Marina Horoshevskaya, Photo: Nikolay Shchipko
