‘My Pushkin’ by Alexey Rumin curated by Ira Konyukhova at the Fabrica CCI in Moscow.

My Pushkin’ by Alexey Rumin
Curated by Ira Konyukhova
11 December 2024  - 10 January, 2025
Fabrika CCI, Moscow

The project is dedicated to the 225th anniversary of the birth of the classic of Russian poetry Alexander Pushkin. The main theme of the project is the problem of constructing a historical image and the form in which it exists today. For Pushkin, whose relationship with the official authorities during his lifetime was ambiguous, the ideologically dominant place in Russian literature and the role of cultural and philological staple were institutionally consolidated in the 1930s. Another anniversary of his fell at the same time — the pompously celebrated 100th anniversary of Pushkin's death, to which the publication of the first parts of Yuri Tynyanov's novel "Pushkin" was timed. In the novel, Tynyanov describes the formative years of Pushkin the child and Pushkin the teenager, seemingly distancing him from the ideological context and making him — due to the literary language and detailed biography of the people around him — a person close to our life, not devoid of banality.

At the exhibition, artist Alexey Ryumin reflects on the fusion of these two paradigms — political and personal — and on how Pushkin the man was integrated into national-imperialist, national-liberation, and national-unifying narratives. The film adaptation of Tynyanov's novel, presented at the exhibition in the format of a sound filmstrip, supports the quasi-documentary nature of the original source's prose with a straightforward formal gesture: the roles of all the characters — real historical figures — are played by their tombstones. Models of these tombstones, made according to life-size measurements, form the installation component of the exhibition. During the happening at the opening and on the days of excursions, the installation was supplemented with offerings from visitors.