Walls

(Photo: Alexander Sorin )

The multi-part project "Walls" - exhibitions, a video film, a children's drawing competition, painting the walls of the museum's new exhibition hall, a "round table", etc. - is called "artistic" in the press release and is marked by the participation of many artistic celebrities. Here you have the classics of “other art” Plavinsky and Roginsky, and the star of perestroika Vrubel (he was the one who painted the wall - or rather, he hung a picture on it repeating his fresco on the Berlin Wall with the image of Sakharov), and the insanely active ones in the last two or three year Moscow "Mitki" Polissky, Batynkov with Lobanov who joined them. Despite this, you shouldn’t treat “Walls” as an art project. There are too many socio-political passions in it (is it necessary to explain what the word “walls” means in the context of the activities of the freedom-loving Sakharov museum, and even on the 79th anniversary of Sakharov’s birth?). And at the main exhibition of the project - "Walls in Time and Space" - in a former garage next to the museum, everything possible was done to prevent the exhibits from being seen. The paintings blend into the rough, unplastered walls, and the photos are hung on strings right up to the ceiling.

But oddly enough, there is something in all this. As well as the fact that photographs of homeless people from the nearby Kursk station and residents of an orphanage in Orekhov coexist with filming of Kosovo. The fact is that the stone walls of the Solovetsky Monastery and the 16th-century "zasek" diagram from Kozelsk to Ryazan (the "zaseks" are, it turns out, barrages of trees) are adjacent to photographs of unfortunate monkeys and lemurs in iron cages. That next to Plavinsky’s painting (triptych “Wall of the Novgorod Temple”) a climbing training structure-climbing wall was built for training “walking on a vertical wall” (anonymous project “Overcoming Walls”). That the “wall” is a gutta-percha and all-encompassing metaphor, thanks to which one can “give visual images of some of the problems of human existence.”

Walls, according to the reasonable opinion of the Sakharovites, should be overcome and broken. Well, without a wall - so without a wall. Which implies complete freedom of action and extraordinary ease of thought. Fortunately, it was under such extreme conditions that the Walls project was created. The result is very useful to look at.