🗓️July 4- 24, 2014
LIBRARY OF BOOK GRAPHICS
📍30, 7th Krasnoarmeyskaya St., St. Petersburg 190005 Russia
◆”Suitcase ” Manifesta 10 Parallel Program◆
An exhibition titled “Suitcase” is opening at the Library of Book Graphics. The project brings together artists working with the concept of memory, preserving reflections on humanity, society, life, and death.
The suitcase is seen as a container for stored artifacts, an archive of history and culture, tucked away in an attic, waiting for its moment to be reopened.
The choice of venue — a library — is not accidental, as libraries are among the most important repositories of bygone eras and memories of them.
St. Petersburg, self-enclosed in its own identity and history, is itself a huge chest filled with stories either lost or saved from oblivion.
Sergey Yakunin and Pyotr Perevezentsev reconstruct the lives of members of the OBERIU literary group and its central figure, Daniil Kharms, contemplating legacy, paper culture, and the preservation of documents from that era.
Mikhail Karasik creates a portrait of a 1930s individual — a collective body with a head in a gas mask, symbolizing the builders and defenders of socialism.
Pyotr Bely reveals the inexhaustible worlds of human banality through a tabletop pierced by a beam of desk lamp light.
Nikolai Nasedkin, a witness to the functioning of the repressive system in one of Leningrad’s psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s, documented what he saw through a series of sketches and notes.
Viktor Lukin constructs a mausoleum-like object, highlighting the Euro-Asian nature of the Russian mentality.
Vladimir Kozin describes the world of simple everyday objects that carry the memorial essence of their former owner, animated by their intimate life.
Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov recall Yuri Gagarin and show personal associations with overcoming gravity.
Andrey Krasulin reflects on the problem of the metaphysical emptiness of the world and things — the “sacred debris” meant to fill this void.
Lyudmila Belova ponders the modern human being, who has become an object of study and manipulation, permeated by information technologies.