The exhibition Mauro Restiffe: Post-Soviet Russia 1995/2015 is the result of the photographer’s experiences between the cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in two different seasons: the first in the mid-1990s, when Russia had just left the Soviet regime, and a second, in 2015, after an invitation to photograph in Moscow the transformation of an old Soviet cafeteria into a new cultural space called the Garage Museum, a reuse project authored by the dutch practice OMA. Eventually, the photos taken were exhibited at the Garage Museum in 2016.
The project was developed in close dialogue with the artist and after a preliminary selection of works, several of meetings were held to discuss issues ranging from conceptual development, such as the narrative of the exhibition, to definitions regarding the materiality of the works themselves, such as the choice of their frames, their mode of assembly and their relationship with complementary information, such as captions and introductory texts.
Once these initial premises were defined, an attempt was made to propose an occupation of the museum’s space that would enhance the feeling of seriality in the artist’s work and at the same time establish an open dialogue with the building, whose spatiality is a very characteristic. As a result, two large planes mounted facing each other were created, each extending approximately 25 meters, resulting in accentuated perspectives whose central vanishing point are elements of the building itself.
On these parallel walls, sets of photographs were arranged on two levels, resulting in a composition of delicate visuality with rhythmic variations in which, not only the isolated works, but the understanding of the series as a whole, are a relevant part of the expography.
Technical Specification
Start of the project: December 2015
Exhibition opening: April 2016
Address: Garage Museum, Moscow, Russia
Exhibition area: 390 m²
Exhibition design: Martin Corullon, Gustavo Cedroni, Helena Cavalheiro, Juliana Ziebell, Manuela Porto, Gabriela Santana, Bruna Canepa, Amanda Amicis
Curatorship: Snejana Krasteva
Photos: Martin Corullon and Mauro Restiffe [exhibition]