2009 | Art project / exhibition
Exhibition: Island of Freedom
Venue: ParaRam Gallery, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Dates: 16–30 May 2009
Event: Night of Museums, 2009
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade
The Island
For Island of Freedom, the Brigade travelled to a place in Yekaterinburg known locally as “Cuba” — the Green (Bolshoy Konny) Island.
The journey became the starting point for an exhibition about a place that was both real and imagined.
The exhibition brought together paintings, photographs, travel notes and documentation of the Brigade’s journey. The material moved between the local “Cuba” and the distant Cuba suggested by its name.
The Brigade’s photographs recorded an actual place. Other images introduced another Cuba — the one known through photographs, media and imagination.
The two realities met in the exhibition.
Cuba / Cuba
A video collage by Marina and Dmitry Razhev (R² ), Cuba–Cuba, brought these two versions of the island together.
The first part documented the Brigade’s journey to the Yekaterinburg island. The second combined photographs from that journey with images of Cuba found online.
The local landscape and the imagined one became difficult to separate.
Rather than simply documenting a journey, the project explored how a place acquires another identity through its name, images and associations.
The Opening
The exhibition opened during the 2009 Night of Museums.
The event included performances, music and dancing, a Cuban kiosk, the screening of Cuba–Cuba, and an interactive reading of Viktor Oborotistov’s travel notes.
The exhibition became another journey — from the local island to the Cuba that existed somewhere else, and back again.