Exhibition project "Arrival of the train." 6+

The large-scale exhibition project “Arrival of the train” unites over a hundred works of domestic and foreign artists and is located in the space of the Ekaterina Culture Foundation. The exposition tells about the train phenomenon in world culture: its dynamics, unexpected appearance, the fact of arrival and invasion of reality have become the canonical symbol of change and the inexorable movement of history forward.

It was the image of the train and the semantic contexts associated with it that enriched actual art and opened up a special space of artistic communications. The technogenic world that arose during the period of the birth of machine devices gained its uniqueness and completeness precisely with the advent of railways in civilization, with the ability to move anywhere in the world, moving along its surface, tunnels and bridges.

The image of the train acts as the organizing element of the exhibition, which is directly expressed in the architectural decision - the audience is literally invited to go into the railway carriage, go through the train, and together with key artists of modern times take an exciting journey of 120 years.

Vitaly Patsyukov, curator of the project:

“Our train moves through the nodal points of culture and social reality, overcoming time strata and vast territories. We see his image in different forms, different genres and techniques - in the documentary chronicle, the first century of silent cinema, avant-garde cinema and video art, in painting, music and literature.

We travel, crossing the art territory of Europe, Russia, the USA, uniting the country, their culture and history into a single integrity. Here we meet a funeral train with the body of Lenin, and a train of the Great Victory, and a car that returns the deceased Chekhov from Germany in the oyster freezer, and industrial trains of the Trans-Siberian Railway sent to the future.

Breaking through the new information age, the train also acts as a carrier of new information, a new symbol of communication, the image of progress that goes through the entire history of our civilization. We show it as clear and graphic as possible, spectacular and nostalgic. The viewer is not just present, he actually rides on this train, joins this space and influences it. ”

At the beginning of the exposition, we find ourselves in the “Historical Train”. The imagery of the railroads was immediately adopted by the cinema: the audience was met by the Lumiere brothers and their “Arrival of the train at La Ciotat station”, first presented publicly more than a century ago, as well as the “Extraordinary Journey” by Georges Méliès, “Edison Silent Trains” and films by Man Ray, born by the rhythms of early jazz. The keynote of the section is the Trans-Siberian Railway, which worried the minds of many representatives of the European avant-garde.

Railway communications here are turning into a connecting factor between Russian culture and world history. The video composition “Trans-Siberian Suite” by Vladimir Smolyar visualizes a metaphor for moving a train through the artistic space of the Eurasian continent. Against the background of the moving train, to the rhythm of the knocking of wheels superimposed on Dmitry Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8, key canvases of the century are flown by - “Soldiers” by Mikhail Larionov, “Peasants” by Kazimir Malevich, “Flying” by Marc Chagall and images of Orphic Cubism by Sonya and Robert Delaunay. The famous video for the song by Boris Grebenshchikov “This train is on fire” completes this part of the exposition.

The Peacebuilding Depot section of the exhibition talks about the achievements of Soviet cinema of the 1930s through fragments of the films Dzigi Vertov’s Symphony of Donbass, Pacific 231 by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Kinopoezd by Alexander Medvedkin. Further we are transferred to America, where the theme of the train was vividly expressed in the style of Westerns and musicals, such as the Great Train Robbery and the Sun Valley Serenade.

The train enters the territory of modern culture, represented by the triptych “Take a Train” by Vladimir Yankilevsky, a video art by Marina Fomenko and Alexandra Mitlyanskaya, travels through Europe in the work of the Russian Dutch Marina Chernikova and takes us directly to Olga Chernysheva from Moscow. The time and space of the exhibition are not linearly arranged: in a two-channel video installation of Natalia and Valery Cherkashin, we go into the subway car in Times Square, and go out on Red Square.

The Depot presents the original works of Soviet artists in the photomontage technique and original constructivist posters glorifying the industrial power of trains. Here, the viewer will see a metallic installation of Alla Urban and a project combining the visual context of the "Big Glass" of Marcel Duchamp with the acoustics of John Cage.

The final section of the exhibition “Venue - Train” enriches the semantic field of the project with references to the image of the train in fiction, theater and paintings of the classics of the second Russian avant-garde.

The section opens with a new work by Konstantin Batynkov “Compositions with the image of the train”, rhyming with photo installations of Lev Melikhov, Vladislav Efimov, an archive chronicle of the arrival of the legendary “Victory Train” on May 10, 1945. This room allows you to see the latest pictorial systems - compositions by Ilya Kabakov and Eric Bulatov, the work of Semyon Faybisovich, Pavel Otdelnov and Igor Shirshkov, examining the links between tradition and the possibilities of new visual optics. One of the key paintings of the section is the social-realistic work of Kuzma Nikolaev “Laying the railway track in Magnitogorsk” from the ROSIZO collection.

Literary and theatrical associations are represented in the “Anna Karenina Hall”, marked by a kind of epigraph - an object by Sergey Katran based on a lecture by Vladimir Nabokov and a binary installation by Natalya Danberg, offering a new dramatic novel where the child’s creative play prevents the death of the heroine Leo Tolstoy. The theme is complemented by the fast-racing train of Anna Efremova, moving in the “reverse” perspective of Pavel Florensky, combining the past and future of our history and inviting Leonid Tishkov to enter the magical “station for two”. The bright, rushing light of the lantern of this train opens the nostalgic total installation of Alexander Brodsky - a reserved seat railway carriage, swaying evenly, flickering with its windows and facing the cultural memory of our childhood. A special place in this “philosophical” art territory is occupied by the “cabinet” of Vadim Abdrashitov, a master of the latest film language, using the image of a train in radical socio-cultural drama.

The exhibition ends with an endless length of the sound image of the locomotive, an integrated acoustic project by Sergey Filatov, which broadcasts its signal into the space of Sergey Golovach’s two-channel installation “Next Chinatown Station” (Russia - China).

The arrow of the Trans-Siberian Railway rushes to the East, where the viewer ends his journey, experiencing the phenomenon of the train in the context of the culture of the last century and discovering in his mind new forms of existence in our technogenic reality.

The organizers and curators of the exhibition express their gratitude to the Ekaterina Culture Fund and personally its founders Ekaterina and Vladimir Semenikhin for the works from the collection provided for the exhibition, as well as for the support in organizing and conducting the project.