"Reto Emh - Installation of Ruin / Jurassic City"

State Museum of Architecture named after A.V. Shchuseva presents the exhibition of the Swiss artist Reto Emkh “Installation of Ruin / Jurassic City”. When drops of water begin to fall on the floor in the Museum of Architecture, seeping through the floors of the Ruin wing, Reto Emh hears a symphony in this. The artist creates an installation with the finest line between real and staged ruins. All he needs is to focus on acoustics and visual images in order to create the illusion of destruction and decline and return to the past.

The Ruin installation is part of Reto Emha’s large-scale Jurassic City project. With a series of pictures taken in 2000-2018, the artist encourages a new look at urban spaces around the world from Moscow to Solothurn, the artist’s hometown at the foot of the Jura Mountains in Switzerland. Like the events of Steven Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park, the motives for the photos are contradictory. Reto Emh draws attention to the fact that in cities, creatures from different eras coexist, like people and dinosaurs from a science fiction film.

Reto Emh was born in 1961 in Switzerland, in the city of Solothurn. After graduation, he studied photography, then worked for several years at the Archaeological Department of the Canton of Solothurn. From 1986 to 1991, he assisted Jean Tangley in the construction of famous kinetic sculptures. Reto Emh exhibited his installations in museums in Basel, Bern, Turin, Venice, Paris and Moscow. The main areas of creativity are installation, sculpture, painting and photography.