The Turliki Game

"The Turliki Game" is an exhibition project set within the walls of Morozova's Dacha in the town of Obninsk. The project turned out to be at once deeply personal and in quiet resonance with the history of the house itself.

The first hall holds drawings and paintings on metal, drawn from my childhood memories of China, where I spent my early years. When I was seven, my parents took me to the Peking Opera. It made an unforgettable impression on me — it was very loud, and very bright. When I first stepped into the blue hall of Morozova's House, I imagined the very same opera performers could have staged a show right there.

Another room is given over to an installation of oversized poppies. Poppies may be flowers of sleep, but what I really wanted was for the house to wake from its slumber. In the entrance hall of the estate, works on the theme of childhood were on view — clothing, a shuttlecock and a racquet, all rendered in metal (once upon a time, this was the site of the "Bodraya Zhizn" — "Vigorous Life" — school-colony).

My inspiration came from Soviet-era wind-up toys made of metal and painted by hand. Each toy was wound with its own key.

That same weight is carried by another piece — a large elephant, drawn across a great many old Soviet envelopes and letters. So much has happened in this place, its history so vast — like an elephant. Another installation, also made of letters and envelopes, is covered with drawings about the lives of the children from the school-colony.

For me, this project was a game played with memory. I had no wish to illustrate the mansion's history — that is the work of documentarians. The very word "game" opens up wide room for manoeuvre. Morozova's Dacha was also known as Turliki. In Polish, turliki means little bells — the jingling of harness bells. Music, chiming, a game, a sleight of hand, a smile, a well-thought-out move, or an invitation to set out on a journey.

Too much has come to rest on the shoulders and the walls of this one house, even though it was built to the very latest engineering standards of its day (concrete, floor slabs, an elevator). In this project I worked with memory — my own and other people's, making the memory of others my own. It is not the first time I have created a project inside a historic mansion, and once again one of the leading characters turned out to be the House itself.

Asya Bolshova, art historian:

"Invisible threads are drawn together here — Chinese theatrical tradition, borrowed from the artist's childhood impressions, and the carnival spirit of the domestic theatricals staged at the beginning of the twentieth century by the mistress of Morozova's Dacha; the stories of the pupils of the 'Vigorous Life' colony and Katya's own reflections on what it means to be a parent; the abandoned state of the architecture and the idea of new growth pushing through, as a hope for a new life.

Turliki has a layered, complicated past, in which the whole of the twentieth century is vividly reflected. Every one of the estate's inhabitants was in their own right a maker of the age: Princess Morozova — a celebrated Russian patron of the arts, founder of the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society and hostess of a Moscow literary-musical salon; Stanislav Shatsky — a pioneering educator and the organiser of the children's colony 'Vigorous Life'.

During the Great Patriotic War, Marshal Georgy Zhukov's headquarters were stationed here; in the 1950s it housed the laboratory of the nuclear physicists who designed the world's first atomic power station. 'When we come here, we see them all — however hard that may be. Every one of these figures is present here,' the artist says. In the stories Katya has drawn out of each of these rooms, she is not trying to recreate a documentary chronicle of events — she is bringing the memory of the space back to life, and binding that memory to her own. And she does it with the skill of Arachne, the spinner of the Greek myth. Only where Arachne wove in the world of the dead, Katya Rozhkova weaves in the world of the living, turning oblivion into the tender chiming of little bells."