Михаил Толмачев. Эскиз. 2020 Михаил Толмачев. Свидетельство о свете. Одноканальная цифровая анимация, кадр, 2020 Михаил Толмачев. Свидетельство о свете. Одноканальная цифровая анимация, кадр, 2020

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the Vadim Sidur Museum present Re-Locations, a project by Mikhail Tolmachev, which explores the mechanisms of human perception and imagination in constructing ideas of the collective past through subjective memories and mediated experience.

The diary of Vladislav Tamarov, a Soviet soldier who spent 621 days in Afghanistan during the 1979-1989 military conflict, serves as the entry point to the internal drama of the project. His memoirs have provided material for works that form the landscape of the exhibition, defined by the three elements: a monologue of the stone, which symbolically represents an unintentional witness and accomplice to the hybrid conflict; a digital reconstruction of the landscape, which allows the viewer to see the different sides of the event; and a performative act, which oscillates between the personal experience of the armed conflict and its reconstruction forming a new subjective reality. The monologue texts and the performance were created together with playwright Natalia Zaitseva and performer Andrei Stadnikov. Combining all elements of the project, Tolmachev reinterprets documentary practices and dwells on different reality constructs lived and experienced by people. He is interested in the phenomenon of the witness and its role is the ever changing contemporary world.

Exploring the concept of memory as action rather than place, Mikhail Tolmachev’s project pursues one of the main objectives of the exhibition programs at the Vadim Sidur Museum, which consists in searching for formats to study collective and individual memory, investigating the representation of traumatic experiences, and elaborating the new narrative patterns to capture memory structures and mechanisms.

Mikhail Tolmachev (born in 1983) lives and works in Moscow and Leipzig. He is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig, the Institute for Contemporary Art and the Izvestia School of Photojournalism in Moscow. Tolmachev received scholarships from the V-A-C Foundation, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the Saxon Cultural Foundation, and the Floating University Summer School. Selected solo exhibitions: I Went There Three Times, but Three Times I Came Back, Gandy Gallery, Bratislava (2018); Silence Pact, GULAG History Museum, Moscow (2016); Beyond Visual Range, the Central Museum of Armed Forces, Moscow (2014); Ground-to-Air, Gallery 21, Moscow (2013). Selected group exhibitions: Industrial Exhibition of Saxony, Audi Hall, Zwickau, Germany (2020); the City of Tomorrow, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (2019); General Rehearsal, MMOMA, Moscow (2018); Migration of Energies, Gandy Gallery, Bratislava (2018).

Natalia Zaitseva (born in 1983, Kirovsk, Murmansk region) — playwright, stage director, publicist. Graduated from the History Department of the Petrozavodsk State University. Her plays Siri and Abuse are performed at the Meyerhold Center. Zaitseva’s play For Mushrooms/Pilze won the Lyubimovka festival in 2019. As director she staged the plays One Hundred Percent Love Fire of Passion Full of Desire to You from Me (2018) and Wow This is Too Much for Me (2020). She is a participant of the Caries of Capitalism project (the play was nominated for the Grand Prix of the XI Sergey Kurekhin Prize in 2019). Creator of the Hot Ultra-modernity podcast and the Telegram channel Check Your Everything. As publicist Zaitseva collaborates with Theater, Knife and Teatralium magazines. In 2020/21 she’s taking part in the Extended Day Group laboratory at the Moscow Yermolova Theatre.

Andrey Stadnikov (born in 1988, Novosibirsk) — theater and film director, playwright. Graduated from VGIK (degree in filmmaking and documentary film) and School for Theatre Leaders. Stadnikov is the author of a number of plays including the Death of Andryusha, Ophelia, the Sun, Terrorists, which have many times featured in the Lyubimovka festival of young drama and the Texture festival. Andrey won the Tom Stoppard Award for his outstanding debut at the Free Theatre international drama competition. He created plays and performances for the Dmitry Brusnikin Workshop, the V-A-C Foundation, the Meyerhold Center, and the Territory festival at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. In 2019 his CHOW DOWN! play took part in the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz (Austria). In 2019, Andrey Stadnikov together with the Motherland play group was awarded the Golden Mask national theater prize «for the experiment which produced a discovery».

Technical partner of the project
Panasonic Russia