I'm Going to Search!

About exhibition

At the Khlebny House an exhibition "I'm Going to Search!" runs until the end of the summer, dedicated to the rituals that accompany all the important events in a person's life. Infancy, growing up, first love, the search for one's place in the sun, maturity, old age — all of these became themes for installations and art objects created specifically for the exhibition by contemporary artists. The exhibition "I'm Going to Search!" is a topical anthropological study in the format of an immersive installation, exploring special traditions and rites that help a person move from one life state to another. Moreover, "rites of passage" include not only life rhythms but also natural pulsations: the change of seasons, light and shadow, sleep and waking. Fourteen authors specially created works for the project on curator-assigned themes ranging from birth to marriage and from seasonal change to choosing a profession. The exhibition occupies nine halls, each with its own title: "Feast", "Winter/Summer", "Night/Day", "Sleep/Wake/Death", "Profession/Hero", "Growing Up/Initiation", "Birth", "Farewell" and "Wedding." Navigation through the exhibition follows a fairy-tale logic: "If you go right — you'll stumble into death; if you go left — you'll end up at a wedding!" And if you turn right from the first hall, you'll learn all about the changes in life that are beyond a person's control, while turning left leads to the most emotional examples of personal choice. The exhibition opens with the installation "A Lavish Feast" by the Planetyanin creative union of artists Evgeny Grinevich and Natalia Kulikova: 167 bearded figures sit at a table and exuberantly celebrate an unknown holiday. It is not so important which one — a wedding, a wake, or a christening — the seven-meter table becomes a living metaphor for the transition from the everyday to the celebratory and, consequently, from one state to another. For the halls "Winter/Summer" and "Day/Night" artist Alexey Tregubov created kinetic canvases on which moving spools and other ingenious devices produce the effect of endlessly changing seasons and times of day. The work is complemented by objects that illustrate the phenomenon of homemade household items: a handcart built on the base of a supermarket trolley, a ski worktable made from a clothes-drying rack, and a radio antenna fashioned from bicycle wheels. In the "Sleep/Wake/Death" hall artist Maria Tregubova created an immersive installation about the blurring of boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, telling the story of a vanished theatrical designer who worked on the play "The Sleeping Princess." A separate hall is devoted to the wedding. It is presided over by artist Andrey Bartenev, who together with the vocal ensemble N’CAGED created an installation with singing based on a composition by composer Vladimir Rannev and a libretto by writer Zhenya Nekrasova. The installation consists of about a dozen black-and-white costumes symbolizing participants in the wedding ritual: the groom, the bride, witnesses, the parents of the marrying couple, and other no less important characters. In the other halls of the exhibition — metaphorical images of motherhood by Irina Korina and Olga Bozhko, a video game about growing up by Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai, and an art object by Alla Urban. Some artists relied on items from the Tsaritsyno collection in their work. The exhibition will display pieces from the museum collection of naive art and wooden folk toys from the late 19th – early 20th century. The Tsaritsyno State Museum-Reserve has always supported contemporary artistic practices related to traditional and folk culture. It is enough to recall the exhibitions "The Path of Patimat" and "City and Craft: A Meeting in Kazan," in whose displays works of folk arts stood alongside works by young artists. The new exhibition logically continues that trajectory.