Exhibitions

The exhibition centers on the stories of people, families, and places that live on through memories and handmade practices. The artists demonstrate that memory exists not only in stories but also in material traces: old photographs, family heirlooms, scraps of fabric, wooden objects, and threads that can literally "stitch" history.

In the series "Reconstructing Memory: Embroidering the Family Archive," Marina Sazonenko explores family archives, migration routes, and the search for personal roots. The artist creates images of the family archive through embroidery and textiles. The faces in the works are left blank, allowing the viewer to see their own family within them.

During the "In Memory" festival, the Yamuzey Museum (Kineshma) opened the exhibition "Family Business: A History of Choice." It features stories from representatives of family dynasties and local projects from various cities in the Ivanovo region. We displayed excerpts from real interviews on special display panels. Our team wanted to show moments of choice: when a person decides whether to stay in the family business or start their own.

To create the illustrations for the display panels, I used collage. I prepared the collage paper by hand, making imprints of various materials: the texture of the wood of an old workbench, the faded fabric of a tablecloth, and the rough surface of a work uniform.

The exhibition is held at the Silk Factory Museum-Laboratory (Kolomna) and presents a visual exploration of sericulture based on educational and fiction literature, the history of the industry, local archival materials, familiarity with the region, and personal impressions.

The entry point into this world is Alessandro Baricco's novel "Silk," in which the East is presented as unknown, alluring, and unattainable. Here, sericulture ceases to be an industry and becomes a metaphor for a longing for the ideal and elusive forms.

The unifying element of the exhibition is tactility: through the fragility of materials and the delicacy of handcraft, the artist draws the viewer into a space where the boundaries between historical fact and artistic fiction become transparent, like silk.

This project is the result of work at the Residence, which was formerly a silkworm farm. The art object visually resembles a box used to transport silkworms to France from China, Japan, and other countries. Each shelf of the box contains artistic interpretations illustrating key moments: from silkworm breeding to silk production. The project functions as a unique archive, combining documentary, artistic, and personal elements.
The goal of the work is to preserve the memory of the craft and highlight its cultural value, as well as to explore the relationship between natural processes, technology, and the cultural heritage of the South of France through an artistic lens.

While analyzing scanned photographs of my maternal grandmother’s relatives, I found copies of the same manuscript, which was made in the late 1980s. The first words of the manuscript, "Our ancestors came to Siberia at the beginning of the 20th century on a New railway as settlers to develop the free Siberian lands…" immersed me not only in the history of my family, but also more in the history of Russian peasant settlers of the early 20th century, who suffered many shocks — resettlement, the First World War war, revolution, collectivization and dispossession, repression, World War II, the devastation of villages, and finally, moving to the city. I wanted to fully immerse myself in these texts and understand every event in this manuscript, go through (stitch) all this way from the beginning to the place where I was already born. The work was presented at the exhibition "Sugar Bowl"
(Novosibirsk).

The exhibition was held at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and was a game show featuring works by avant-garde artists El Lisitsky, Vera Ermolaeva, Yakov Meksin, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, Eduard Krimmer and contemporary authors. For this exhibition, I created a cardboard installation and conducted workshops for children. Link to the exhibition Take the pieces of paper

The exhibition was held in the Yamuzey space (Kineshma) and was an artistic interpretation of the family archive, embodied in embroidery, printing on fabric, hand theater and other objects of applied creativity. More information about the exhibition can be found on the website of the Museum Reconstruction of Memory.

In 2023, for the Bauman Patterns exhibition, comic artist Yana Kuleshova and I sewed a map of the Bauman district. This map refers to the period of childhood, when the street and courtyard are perceived as a space for games, creativity and imagination. The characters that inhabit the neighborhoods were born as they walked around the area, and are built on personal associations, memories, and fantasies.
This is how a jungle with a tiger appears on the site of a small park, a cage where a fabulous bird has settled in the restaurant area, the railway becomes a roller coaster, and the Paper Mill becomes a factory for the production of clouds. As a researcher of children’s literature in the German Settlement area, I collected the plots of the novel by the German writer Irmgard Coin "The Girl the Children were not Allowed to Hang out with" (1936), which tells about a Cologne schoolgirl, her games, dreams and pranks in her hometown. An article about the map was published in the Metro newspaper in 2024.

The exhibition "Gender/scissors/Paper" is dedicated to children’s creativity and games on the pages of Soviet magazines "Chizh", "Hedgehog", "Murzilka", "Cricket", "Funny Pictures" and others in the period from the 1920s in the 1980s. Board games, paper "clippings" and paper models of machinery, "strollers" and puzzles are all components of children’s daily routine of the Soviet era. The gender order in the Soviet Union was shaped by the state and can be roughly divided into three periods, each of which is reflected in children’s culture. Interview