Negatives

Exhibition of abandoned slides

The layout of the exhibition Negatives is built around a roll of camera film, once saved by David Sarkisyan — the then Director of the Shchusev Museum of Architecture — from a waste bin. The frames on that film include statues of cultural significance from around the world, yet the full story of these negatives is unknown.

The exhibition was dedicated to the release of the book David — the biography of David Sarkisyan. David’s museum office — a real Aladdin’s cave — was world famous. Here, he would lovingly assemble fascinating objects, received as presents, got as trophies and brought by all other possible means from various places around the world.

In one of David's boxes lay black-and-white film negatives. Years after the office had been turned into a permanent exposition at the “Ruin” wing of the Museum of Architecture, negatives from the box were scanned and the fascinating pictures appeared. We think that David would have liked these shots: the film roll was infected by mould and partly destroyed, from which the negatives became covered in blue patches that sometimes resonate with the remains of the images.

Not only are negatives from David’s box presented at the exhibition, but also their prints that were all developed by hand. The negatives remind us of a time when David was at the center of the Moscow architectural world and his office was full of objects — sophisticated and sumptuous, expensive and superfluous, significant and meaningless. An uninterrupted stream of visitors flowed through, all of whom noted the refinement of the collection and the beauty of David rising out of and above these surroundings.

Credits

CONCEPT:  Alexander Brodsky, Yury Grigoryan, Taisia Osipova

PHOTO PRINT: Andrey Shagin

GRAPHIC DESIGN: Ivan Stepanenko

TRANSLATION: Ben De Courcy Jones

LIGHTBOX: Artsy Group

FURNITURE: Alexander Volzhansky

PHOTO FRAMES: Premium Baget, ROOM34

EXPOSITION PHOTOGRAPHS: Alexander Orlov

We express our sincere gratitude to: Kirill Asse, Vsevolod Babichuk, Alexey Buslenko, Evgeny Cherepanov, Natalia Dormidontova, Nadezhda Isaeva, Andrey Kirillov, Anatoly Korshunov, Anastasiya Lipatova, Oleg Oleinikov, Alexander Orlov, Anna Rudakova, Mikhail Shilokhov, Ivan Shpak, and Gleb Soshnikov.

We are thankful to the Roza Azora Gallery and its founders Lyubov Shaks and Elena Yazykova, and their team — Tatiana Voronina, Olga Yelshevskaya, Lyudmila Manchevskaya, and Nataliya Yugay.

An exhibition catalogue “Negatives” was published as part of the “MGNM books” program by the Meganom office for architecture.

ISBN 978-5-6040023-2-2

UDC 72(47+57)(084.121) BBC 85.113ya6

Auth. sign N41