2020 / curated project / installation, audio, video, archival objects / Innovation Cultural Centre, Kaluga
Curator — Katya Rozhkova
Participants: Liza Olshanskaya, Katerina Kovaleva, Keiko Kobayashi, Natasha Ivanova, Katya Levental, Vera Khlebnikova, Natalia and Maria Arendt, Katya Rozhkova, and Irina Solovyova — parachutist, member of the cosmonaut corps, and the principal understudy to Valentina Tereshkova.
The exhibition also featured works by Alexander Labas and Garif Basyrov from the curator's own collection.
The show was staged as part of the 8th Tsiolkovsky Fest Festival of Contemporary Art.
Every girl has a dress, and many dresses besides. First they are dressed like dolls, and then, in time, they begin to dress themselves. Clothing is the fabric we are wrapped in at the beginning of life and again at its end. Clothing is material, textile, cloth. And cloth is a notion tied closely to space. This exhibition considers the dress as an individual cosmos (the Russian word meaning space) for the woman who wears it — in this case, nine artists and one woman-cosmonaut.
Clothing in this project is a character in its own right: a witness, a relic, the outer casing of a life once lived. A grandmother's dress made of parachute silk — a piece from Katya Rozhkova's family archive. A shirt stitched in memory of a sister, by Natasha Ivanova. A kimono patterned with butterflies, sewn by Keiko Kobayashi together with her grandmother.
Each dress lives in its own wardrobe; the wardrobes can be opened and closed, and the dresses themselves can be touched. At the heart of the exhibition is an installation entitled "Feast Days," assembled from pre-revolutionary christening gowns, medical smocks and dresses from the sixties, gathered from all across the country. Everything in the installation is white — because white is what is finest, and what we wear on our feast days. You can step inside "Feast Days" and pause to ask yourself: what, in truth, is your personal cosmos made of?
Katya Rozhkova and her grandmother's wedding dress
My own personal cosmos began the moment I took my grandmother's dress into my hands. Many years after her death. The dress had been sewn from a parachute. The war was on, it was late 1944, and my grandfather was in flight school. War and love — both at once; that's simply how it happened. A dress was needed for the bride, and so a real parachute made its way into the house. My grandfather had got hold of it somewhere, from the flight school, presumably. And from it a wedding dress was made for my grandmother. Now it hangs in my wardrobe — a dress of impossible beauty. My youngest daughter Varya walks up to the mirror and holds it against herself. The dress remembers my grandmother, and it remembers my mother, still inside her belly. And today it is I and my daughters who touch it.
Liza Olshanskaya and the school uniform
In the most festive wardrobe of all hangs a modest school uniform in the shape of a dress. It was knitted long ago by the artist's grandmother. Unlike the stiff, scratchy uniform of those years, this one came out soft and pleasant to wear. Liza wore it for several years, and it grew along with her: her grandmother would lengthen it, take it in, sew on new pieces. In memory of her grandmother Mirra, Liza created the art object "The Endless Dress," which was presented at the exhibition.
Vera Miturich-Khlebnikova and the Snowflake dress
A dress her mother sewed in a single night for the New Year's morning play at kindergarten — a snowflake costume. A dress of the thinnest gauze, with a tall paper crown and little discs cut from foil. During the night, the "snowflake" was scorched by the iron; her father hit upon the idea of covering the hole with a Suprematist disc cut from the same foil. The costume was delivered to the kindergarten in the final minutes — by the time all the other children had already changed into hares and Snow Maidens.
Keiko Kobayashi and the butterfly kimono
Keiko Kobayashi's grandmother was born in 1905; her youth coincided with the Meiji and TaishÅ eras, and the years of the First World War. In those days, Japanese women wore kimono every day, and every one of them knew how to sew one. Years later, Keiko asked her grandmother to teach her this beautiful art. Her grandmother chose an indigo-coloured fabric, scattered with white butterflies. Every pattern piece in a kimono is straight, and simple to cut. The butterfly is the soul of a young woman.
Ekaterina Levental
and the polka-dot dress
The main characters in Ekaterina Levental's work are dresses. She had painted the polka-dot dress before, but that painting burned along with her house. The dress itself, however, survived the fire. Now Ekaterina compares it to the manuscript that does not burn.
Natasha Ivanova and the shirt "Siamese Twins"
This piece is for those who were born into an unbreakable oneness of body, spirit, longings and life's path. Natasha Ivanova's shirt "symbolises the loss of the other half of oneself, of a person close to you; the yearning, and the sense of an emptiness that cannot be filled; the caesura in a life, its slowing down, the pause between the movements, the loss of a most intimate part of being — but not the loss of memory, for that stays inside you for the whole of your life, for the whole of your allotted span."
Cosmonaut Irina Solovyova and the shirt "2,000 Jumps"
The number on the parachute-silk shirt marks the count of jumps Irina Solovyova completed as she trained to become the first woman ever to fly into space. The original plan had called for two women's crews to make the flight simultaneously, but in March 1963 the decision was taken that only one cosmonaut would go up. In the end, that honour fell to Valentina Tereshkova (who had made ninety jumps), while Irina Solovyova was appointed her understudy. Solovyova made her final parachute jump at the age of fifty-five, but she stayed on to work at the Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City.
Katerina Kovaleva and the everyday dress
The artist made an installation from paper and tracing paper, recreating her mother's dress.
Maria and Natalia Arendt — dresses embroidered with helicopters, and a family contribution
The sisters passed their contribution down through their grandmother and grandfather, who were themselves bound up with Tsiolkovsky and with Kaluga: their grandfather created the striking monument to Gagarin that has recently been handed over to the museum, and his wife corresponded with the great scientist himself.
