Kirill Gluschenko
OUR DAYS ARE RICH AND BRIGHT
‘Our Days Are Rich And Bright’ is a summary exhibition of the Gluschenkoizdat publishing house, its founder and only employee being the artist Kirill Gluschenko. For many years, he has been going on business trips to the cities of the former USSR and the socialist bloc to create and publish books about these cities. The book becomes an artwork as the most intimate form of contact with the viewer against the background of a large-scale publishing enterprise, not devoid of bureaucratic poetry and scope. The mystifying power of Gluschenkoizdat hides behind itself the figure of the artist, who formally reconstructs the Soviet book and the process of its production, but in fact is looking for evidence of the existence of the former reality, opposing the assertion of its disappearance. These books, created in one copy, look exactly like albums of the late Soviet period about new construction sites and spacious cities, which were published in thousands of copies. For many years, the book has been a strategic cultural product of the country, a marker of the social status of the owner and a measure of the scope of departmental publishing. Books’ artistic and technical design, printing industry, multiplied by the machinery of Goskomizdat and by the system of libraries, book collectors and traders, produced a distilled product, purified in all respects, reflecting the spirit of the times. Publishing houses occupied large areas in Moscow, but unlike other rudiments of Soviet cultural production such as libraries, cinemas and museums, the book publishing system disappeared, leaving almost no place names or buildings in the urban space. The exhibition will be held in the space of one of the former Moscow factories on Polkovaya Street, not far from which publishing houses Prosveshchenie and Children's Book were previously located.
Katerina Chuchalina
VENETS. WELCOME TO THE IDEAL
This wonderful book documents the architectural results of another Soviet anniversary – the celebrations of the centenary of Lenin’s birth in Ulyanovsk, formerly Simbirsk, the small city on the Volga where he was born. Told by the authorities in Moscow that the ‘door would be open’ for them to modernise their mainly wooden, one-storey, Tsarist city for the duration of the celebrations, and that they’d close it immediately when it was over, the local Party rushed to build a Museum, a Library, a Palace of Culture, housing, an Airport and the high-rise Hotel Venets before the tap of money and resources was turned off. In its first year of opening, two Poles, 70 Britons, and more than 3,000 East Germans arrived to stay in the Hotel Venets, and we get to read the inventory of difficult questions they answered (‘can we see how people live in those little wooden houses?’), and find out how hotel staff took it out on the guests.
Owen Hatherley for Architectural Review
‘MOSCOW LIGHTS’ ...ON THE MOSCOW AVENUE
Gluschenkoizdat, a small Kaliningrad publishing house, became widely known thanks to the large-scale ‘Our Days Are Rich And Bright’ exhibition, which took place at the Moscow Stankolit plant in 2016. Muscovites and guests of the capital got acquainted with the various products of the publishing house, including both photo albums dedicated to the cities of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, and a unique publication – the diary of Nikolay Kozakov, a bus driver and hunter who lived in the Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) region. Albums and archives published by Gluschenkoizdat draw attention to the literary and visual intonations of the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ era. Using slightly faded shades of black and white, Gluschenkoizdat recalls how a much freer and more elegant subject, a citizen of the post-war USSR, was born outside the threat of mass repression. A documentary film about the publishing house’s backstage life, filmed for the Triennial, is shown in a space that recreates the interiors of the Barrikady cinema in Kaliningrad, the most important cultural site of the city, where in the 2000s concerts of noise and electronic music, poetry slams and other events were held. In the 2010s, the Russian Orthodox Church took ownership of the cinema and dismantled it.
Valentin Diakonov