Ghostly Museum

Ghostly Museum is a photographic hybrid, speculative documentary based on real events. The work addresses the long and difficult history of the Norilsk Museum, its reincarnations, in particular, as well as general issues of museology as a scientific discipline. One of the events that prompted me to take up this project was the liquidation of the museum for unknown reasons in 1965 and the loss of its collections. A limited number of photographs of those old museums (two in the old part of the city and later a museum as part of the Dom Tekhniki at 12 Komsomolskaya Street) are now kept in the archives of the modern museum. Only the catalog-guide to the museum, compiled by S.A. Tkachevsky in 1948 and the inventory of objects accepted for storage give an idea of the thematic sections and exhibits of those times. In the course of working on the series, I reconstructed some archival photographs, captured various places, objects and situations of our time, and also created some of them myself. For example, I installed a museum shelving on one of the former places of the museum on Ozernaya street, 9a; sent a capsule with objects of the era to the future; created a multi-temporal labeling for one of the paintings of the artist N.P. Loy; and also was engaged in the sale of stones that were not valuable in reality on Norilsk street. The shots of the project are stylized as archival ones, they deliberately confuse the past and the present, the viewer is stimulated to launch their own construction or complete the narrative of the history. 25 copies 72 pages In English and Russian Digital offset Open spine 21 x 27 cm