Marina Azizyan. THIS IS MY VILLAGE

Twenty-seven years ago, a city dweller, a diva, a star, a celebrity of Russian scenography bought a house on a mountain in a new town in the poor village of Zaozerye. The whole village of Zaozerye stands on a mountain, but the only clean drinking well in Zaozerye is below, under the mountain. Water does not flow uphill, altitude is always salvation from floods and spill lakes. But for the pleasure of effortlessly going down and getting drunk from a clean source every time you need to pay your price: climbing back. In those years, the era of big changes entered the St. Petersburg calendar and the house in the village of Zaozerye became the most reliable breadwinner of the city family of the artist Marina Tsolakovna Azizyan. Like at the time of the flood, as to the summit of Ararat, her family landed in Zaozerye with an entire ark: with little granddaughters, many friends, invited and sudden guests, and a whole courtyard of meowing, clucking, crowing living creatures, without which there is no living village farmstead.

Now, as time passes, Azizyan calls this looking-glass behind the looking glass “her” village. The village of Marina Azizyan from now on is her village, she is perceived, lived in, not separable, inseparable.

Marina, the guardian of Zaozerye, his ethnographer and his preacher, a miracle of the opposite reflection happened: the stage designer, who built, wrote and painted the imaginary worlds for fifty years in cinema, on stages, in galleries, returned the real living Novgorod Zaozerye to our urban world of man-made scenography. The exhibition in Korea is another life of the famous artist and inventor Azizyan.

Each log or funny inscription on the gate is not invented, such inscriptions are still there or were in Zaozersky Looking Glass before, the fire really burned, and a familiar cow wanders through the distant hills every summer to the spiteless slowness of the owner.

In this Zaozersky world, which he built, painted, glued and fashioned from mache Azizyan’s papier, there are no alienated objects created in imitation of the “folk village”.

Each item is a living character in the action of a true Zaozersky story. The old woman who fell face down was once picked up by Marina herself and dragged by herself back into the mountain, the portraits of the people of Azizyan’s authorship are not unfounded, and even the deceased in her grave has a personal story about a white wedding veil: this funeral of a blessed village, beloved by a harmless fool nicknamed “ girl "did not finish the long-standing long-standing Zaozersky fairy tale about the" girl "groom on BAM.

All these people, names, objects of the dying Novgorod village are stopped in their inevitable decay, they will not disappear. From now on, they are saved and returned to themselves, the city, us, to our material world, they are animated by the personal perception of a great artist.

The exhibition in Korea, like a fairy-tale box, is full of sun, fog, gable roofs, wonders, mirror reflections, secrets and secrets, keys, sunflowers, stove smoke, waiting for the arrival of a shop, wooden spoons, troughs, fishing boats, flowers and live magpie cod.

Marina Tsolakovna does something amazing: she gratefully returns the dignity of the village she loves. This exhibition is its ascent to the pure spring, to that below, under the mountain, in its Zaozerye.