“Photographic works are exclusively the author’s authentic prints of their time”

Kommersant FM columnist Dmitry Butkevich talks about what projects have started in Moscow.

A number of very interesting exhibition projects are currently taking place in Moscow. It’s a sin, but for the last couple of months I’ve somehow become interested in the regions and have organized exhibitions in a row in Arzamas, Norilsk, Saratov, Novosibirsk. The tour is finally over, I returned to the capital and I want to see with you what interesting things have opened up here.

I’ll start with the Beton Center for Visual Culture, which, in its own space on Yakimanskaya embankment, is showing the exhibition “Alphabet. Soviet photography of the 1920-1930s.” The site has its own, it must be said, impressive collection of domestic photography. I saw her, believe me. From their collection, the founders of “Beton” show more than 100 photographs of 50 outstanding master reformers of Soviet and world photography of the first third of the 20th century. It is worth especially noting that these are exclusively author’s authentic prints of their time.

The exhibition is called “Alphabet” because it was on this principle that the organizers organized the exhibition. There are absolute leaders here – Alexander Rodchenko, Arkady Shaikhet, Boris Ignatovich, and there are also artists little known in the non-professional environment, for example, Boris Kudoyarov, Fyodor Kislov, Sergey Shimansky.

And just recently, another Center for Contemporary Culture called “Malt House” opened in the building of the former Khamovnichesky Brewery. I remember Khamovnichesky as a brewery named after. Badaeva. I don’t know how the Bolshevik Pyotr Badaev deserved his posthumous fame, but my peers loved the enterprise named after him; at the university we even went there for practical training (as patronage). Wonderful memories of youth!

Now the exhibition “Khamovniki Island” is open here. The exhibition-research, as is fashionable lately, is dedicated to the area from a historical, cultural, and geographical perspective. Photographs, archival documents, artifacts of residents of the area, among whom were Leo Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg. Hence the Sovriska objects: “Tolstoy’s Head” by Ira Korina and a large-scale installation with beer malt.