The exhibition is very small and very easy to pass by, because it is located in a canopy hall to the left of the entrance to the commercial exhibition on the second floor. They expected something different, says the curator of the exhibition Marina Ignatushko: some white wall and natural light, with electric lamps and gray-green walls, it is not easy to see the exhibits, but it is worth trying, because the exhibition is made masterly.
Along the wall, on almost invisible glass legs, there are white box frames, a bit reminiscent of the classic camera obscura. Inside each is a glass slide with one of the famous buildings of Nizhny Novgorod, starting from the bank "Guarantee" with its stucco, majolica, similar to Art Nouveau facade and ending with the building of the Olympic Reserve School "Gymnast" by Alexei Kamenyuk - austere, geometric, aluminum, but in Nizhny Novgorod still colored. The slides are large and multi-layered, the foreground is printed on the topmost layer, and so on - imitating deletion, and quite skillfully, you do not immediately understand what is special in these slides, although a hint of eye volume is caught automatically.
“I wanted to somehow show the peculiarity of the architecture of Nizhny Novgorod, its inherent craftiness,” says Marina Ignatushko. On my own I would add that usually we are used to denote something not very good with the word handicraft, the habit of not respecting the craft and scolding with this word everyone who wants to be distinguished from the so-called "great artists with a flight of thought" has eaten into our brains since the days of romanticism (although by no means neglected craft of the XIX century. But here the craft is not abusive, it denotes hand-made and that human quality, which now in common parlance it is customary to denote by the word soulfulness. Nizhny Novgorod architecture turns out to be warm even when it is glass - it is enough to come to this city, or at least look at the building of "Gymnast", which is responsible at the exhibition for modernity, to understand this. So, the slides, with their careful and slightly naive hand-made, very well express this quality of a craft that knows how to behave with dignity. I must say that this is a rare quality in our latitudes - the ability to analyze oneself with dignity and without exaltation.
According to Marina Ignatushko, the second feature of Nizhny is the air or even more precisely the wind. A city above a river, a city consisting of ravines, a city developing in waves - that is, there is no - like gusts of wind: "this quality is well reflected by hovercraft and hydrofoil missiles, where there are wings, but under water" - says the curator … Even better, almost completely, this property of the city is reflected in the project "Lift forces", shown here on the screen. For the second year in a row, the French artist Xavier Jujo comes to Nizhny and, together with his students, catches the river wind on the Strelka with the help of various simple but large devices such as plastic sheets or even garbage bags (see the project page on Facebook). This is also a step towards studying the plastic features of the city, or rather even Strelka, where they have been designing and planning to build something for many years.
This exhibition leaves a very light impression; not everyone manages to show themselves so naturally. But what is really there - walking around "Arch Moscow", you understand that the topic is complex, painful, and maybe even premature for Moscow in general. Reflection is an unpleasant business, and especially a public one. Whether it is Nizhny. The city, about the specificity of which critics have been talking and writing since the nineties, when it, easily and freely, like the wind, arose its own architecture - such a city simply could not but appear at an exhibition called “identity”.
