"From the collection of the museum. The choice of employees"

From December 27, 2018 to April 14, 2019, the Moscow Museum presents an exhibition that allows you to see the museum through the eyes of those who work in it. Its exhibits were selected from the collections by employees of various museum departments, from the ranger to the director. And each employee in the commentary will tell why this choice fell on this thing.

The principle of the exhibition “From the collection of the museum. The choice of employees ”is simple: employees of all positions and ranks became curators for a short time and selected one item from museum funds. There were no restrictions on the epoch, origin, type of exhibit, its size. As a result, the exhibition unites more than 50 exhibitions of one exhibit. You can see nearby the masterpieces of the collection, rarely exhibited items and things, which are associated with personal experiences or memories. There are wonderful stories of replenishment of funds, scientific research, and even curiosities and misses. Archaeological finds and porcelain coexist with painting and graphics, photographs and videos, a razor set of a Napoleonic army soldier - with a trash bin made by a 3D printer, a prehistoric vase - with a volume of Karl Marx’s works and a video cassette.

Director of the Moscow Museum Alina Saprykina: “For the museum, this exhibition is an important project. This is an opportunity to look in the mirror, to feel like one. Show the richness and diversity of the collection. Once again, to realize that the museum does not just work continuously, but also carries out its mission, creates a creative product in which everyone’s participation is important and decisive. And for the visitor this is a chance to look at the museum from the inside, through the thoughts, opinions, feelings of those who work in it. ”

The main curator of the Museum of Moscow Alina Fedorovich: “Important work preceded the exhibition. Representatives of many specialties work in the museum, and for employees of different departments it became an opportunity to get acquainted with the museum’s collection closer, which does not always happen in their daily work. Each choice is based on a unique personal chain of associations, experience, preferences, somewhere predictable, somewhere unusual. The exhibition also became a kind of sociological research: one of the observations, for example, is that the favorites from many are items from the porcelain collection. ”