Exhibition "Museum Studio"

About exhibition

The exhibition department "Museum Studio" presents a unique collection of furniture and interior items from the late 18th to the early 21st century. Visitors are invited to immerse themselves in the vivid and varied world of furniture and to learn the life history of each exhibit. The department displays only a small part of a large furniture collection numbering over 500 items. Its formation began relatively recently — in the early 1970s, when the Irkutsk State United Museum began establishing new branches: the Volkonsky and Trubetskoy estates and the Taltsy Architectural and Ethnographic Museum. It is the result of a number of ethnographic expeditions to different parts of the region and many years of painstaking collecting in Irkutsk. Among the items are objects that belonged to Irkutsk residents: merchants, officials, military personnel, workers and clerks, longtime inhabitants of Angara villages and Buryat uluses. The furniture in the department moved from pre-revolutionary estates, apartments and furnished rooms with their owners into solid Soviet pre-war and post-war buildings, and later into mass brick and panel apartment blocks that gradually replaced wooden Irkutsk. Some pieces spent their long lives in one place: a sideboard that belonged to the sworn attorney and deputy of the Irkutsk City Duma Ivan Sergeyevich Fateev was brought with its owner to an apartment on Bolshaya Street in 1919 and was donated to the exhibition by his heirs 104 years later. Many of the buildings that once housed these items have now burned down, been dismantled or demolished — but the furniture remains. Visitors can learn detailed stories about the items from guided tours and the audio guide, or by scanning the QR code placed next to each object.