In the hall where Artplay usually conducts lectures and conferences, the floor is lined with felt. From the loudspeakers one can hear birdsong, then steppe rhythms. Felt covers rows of artificial hills between which you can walk or lie looking at the ceiling. From cameras installed at the zenith of felt domes, slides with photographs of Totan Kuzembaev's houses are projected onto circular disks attached to the ceiling: it looks like planets in the sky. On the balcony of the hall there are graphic sheets by Totan Kuzembaev, all of 1998, on all of them there is a finely-fine outline of a city that looks like an ornament of an oriental carpet from a distance, but on the sheets it is laid out in strict geometric and sometimes ornamental figures of predominantly astral nature: spirals, squares and discs …
A catalog was published for the anniversary and the exhibition: a massive book wrapped in a piece of felt with many pictures and a minimum of text. The words (something like a curatorial message) were written by Yuri Avvakumov. Here, about the children who were going to walk from the steppe to the mountains, caught wild donkeys, did not reach, returned - and about the properties of materials on Vitruvius. About children, about toy bricks made of clay, dried in matchboxes - real stories from the childhood of Totan Kuzembaev, and Vitruviy - he is here in some way because of gravity (the name, as follows from the text, was suggested by Totan Kuzembaev). The idea of the installation is also practically deciphered in the curator's message: felt - yurts, domes - steppe, windows with projectors - "shanyrak" holes in the domes of yurts, "floating images - a mirage city". It is not very clear how, after all, a city came out of the mountains to which the children went - Avvakumov hints at a game with the roots of words (mountain-city) and immediately rejects it - there is no such consonance in the Turkic languages; the city gets attached badly, illogically and all the time strives to stay on the sidelines (just around the corner?).
Strictly speaking, the idea of the installation (the authors are Yur. Avvakumov and Totan Kuzembaev) is very clear: it encodes the architect's path, those same 60 years from the Kazakh steppe to Moscow villas and Venetian installations. The cosmic path, the fantasticness of which is becoming more tangible every year. From the Kazakh steppe to the Moscow elite (and Totan Kuzembaev is now undoubtedly the architect of the elite) - the distance is unimaginable in our times, as from the earth to the stars or as for children from the steppe aul to the mountains. In his interviews, Kuzembaev often talks about how he came to Moscow to study as an artist, learned that in Stroganovka it was necessary to "bring a still life", but he did not know what a still life is, and therefore chose the Moscow Architectural Institute - an institute where still life was not necessary … Agree, in our time, this story sounds completely crazy. Now, frankly speaking, this is impossible. Cosmic.
So here is the installation with its title "Gravity" - about overcoming gravity. Below is the Kazakh steppe, we lie on it, it attracts like the earth. Above - the stars (more precisely, space, the melody of spheres, something from the "secret of the third planet"), Moscow "star" (and they certainly are) projects of Totan Kuzembaev. The path seems to be insurmountable, and yet it has been overcome, the architect does not say how, the architect is laconic and willingly tells only stories from his childhood, but he can show - here it is, gravity has been overcome. And at the same time, being overcome, the attraction retains its strength: the power of childhood memories, the otherness and externality of the Kazakh steppe in relation to the capital's Moscow and, more broadly, European reality.
Meanwhile, Totan Kuzembaev is a very European architect, which can be clearly seen in his wooden country houses (Kuzembaev does not build in the city and does not seem to even strive) and in all his other works: objects, installations, graphics. I don’t know how this is possible “without a still life” upon admission, but this architect absorbed European culture with all its nuances better than many Muscovites. He absorbed, including the European (!) Love for Orientalism, and here a paradox arises: from time to time, European Orientalism pushes the architect to use himself as an oriental landmark - just as many contemporary artists use themselves as an exhibit of installations (for example, hanging from a naked view on a tree, which we recently observed at Archstoyanie). Totan, however, never goes to extremes. Memories of childhood become for him the material of the installation - he has a full innate right to this exotic material, more than his Moscow or European colleagues - the right to experience. And the material fits into the object as part of a mosaic (Totan's portfolio contains a whole series of mosaic paintings made from different things: earth, grains, vinyl records, old shoes), somewhere it can be too exotic to take root (for example, 4 years ago on At the Venice Biennale, Kuzembaev showed a yurt with a Zaporozhets inside, which symbolized the nomadic nature of the East-West), but somewhere it turns out to be sincere and appropriate - like now. In any case, a birthday is the right occasion to remember childhood.
The east-west dichotomy is well read here, even if we analyze spatial sensations. For me personally, the felt carpet, in front of which you have to take off your slippers, felt more like a mosque than a steppe. (Although here one could, for example, recall Joshua and say that by forcing visitors to take off their shoes, Totan is thus offering to honor his native land - the steppe in its symbolic embodiment.) Domes with light-emitting windows are like the roof of an oriental bazaar (or baths, or the courtyard of a mosque), to us, Muscovites, familiar from childhood from photographs of Bukhara and Samarkand, and now - from travels to Istanbul. However, never! - we emphasize this here - no hints of oriental architecture were noticed in the projects of Totan Kuzembaev.
On the other hand, the space of the hall, the twilight, music, video projections, lying on the floor - all this definitely refers us to the sensations of the Venice Biennale, an event that is more than European, not oriental. It's like entering one of the halls of the Arsenal. Here you can clearly see the "Venetian" handwriting of Yuri Avvakumov, who for some time began to measure many of his things with one or another Venetian module (making the exposition "Architecture", he emphatically laid there the dimensions of the Russian pavilion in Giardini).
All together it turned out cosmically: a look from the Kazakh steppe into eternity and, to some extent, a demonstration of the ability of a person who dreams of mountains and stars to easily overcome barriers and distances.
The exhibition will run until August 28.
A more detailed monographic exhibition is planned separately at the Museum of Architecture.
