Exhibition «Science in the Big City. The Intellectual Landscape of Sverdlovsk»

About exhibition

A family portrait of Yekaterinburg science — this is a brief way to describe the exhibition dedicated to local scientific schools and their leaders. Among the latter are the geologist and mineralogist Konstantin Matveev; the metallurgists Akim Golovin, Ivan Sokolov and Nikolai Baraboshkin; the physicists Sergey Vonsovsky and Sergey Sidorov; the metallurgist/materials scientist Vissarion Sadovsky; the chemist Isaak Postovsky; the mathematician Nikolai Krasovsky and design engineer Nikolai Semikhatov; the biologist Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky; and the archaeologist Elizaveta Bers. The visitor begins the tour with the triad of geology, seismology and metallurgy — the earliest scientific disciplines of the Urals in chronological terms. In the mechanical engineering hall metal becomes structure. The final hall in this sequence is mathematics. An alternative route runs through the enfilade of rooms opposite: phenology, archaeology, radiobiology and astronomy, and it naturally culminates in plant physiology and medicine. The exhibits were provided by dozens of research institutes of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, departments and archives of the city's educational institutions, museums and enterprises. A separate and very important exhibition layer is the media layer: fragments of newsreels, audio installations and interviews with scientists, as well as contemporary art — kinetic objects, sculpture, and the metaphysics of science expressed in music and dance.