“Bakal” at the exhibition in the Ural branch of the Pushkin Museum

“Excavation in progress”

December 16, 2022 — March 12, 2023

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts / NCCA Yekaterinburg, Russia

Curator: Artyom Antipin

“Excavation in progress” is the exhibition of works by mentors and graduates of the Young Artist Lab (YAL) and works from the media art collection and archive of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. The second season of the YAL, launched in 2021, performed an educational mission by offering courses for emerging artists and also supported mentor-artists by providing them with studios in the museum building. Thematically, the exhibition refers to one of the important subjects of the Laboratory’s research — the experience of the Past. The title “Excavation in progress” is associated with preliminary, prospecting actions that must be carried out before building something new. The exhibition presents three works from my project “Bakal” — documentation of two performances and a video “Three Days of Sieberts”. The last, which was shown only once before, but now seems even more relevant, is assembled from archival found footage and represents the story of the Siebert family. Like thousands of other Russian Germans, during the Second World War, their ancestors were deported to the Urals and Siberia, to the northern regions of Kazakhstan and to remote areas of Central Asia. In August 1995, grandmother and grandson Siebert immigrated to Germany. An amateur camera documented the last three days spent by relatives in Russia.