PEOPLE + BABI (WOMEN)
April 27 - May 23, 2001

Press Release

Contemporary Art Gallery "OkNo"
supporting by Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation), Russia (it has been recognized as an undesirable organization in Russia since 2015)
presents project "People + Babi"
April 27 - May 23, 2001

The project combines independently working performers of different kinds of art: photo-artist Ildar Ziganshin (Ekaterinburg) and Studio of new play "Babi (Women)" (Chelyabinsk).

It was no accident that the idea of the project was hit upon, but it occurred quite unexpectedly, during a talk about photography.

"Photography is too powerful a thing to be easily manipulated. A snapshot will always bear an everlasting testimony to the reality of the moments of life, making them fast frozen in, just as if into the permafrost. Since making the first pictures with the easiest hand camera of my childhood I have experienced a lifelong sensation of the expanse of my past receding from me into the distance. Whenever I take a look at some of the snapshots, I become awake to this sensation anew, feeling a pang of a particularly sharp pain.

It is probably because I have no other plain evidence to prove that it did really take place. As well as because I am well aware of the transience of life," Ildar Ziganshin.

On the basis of the modern plays staged by Elena Kaluzhskikh's Women's theatrical company, we set ourselves to reconstruct a vast continuous stretch of eight years, from 1983 to 2000, putting new life into the photographs of the persons of both sexes, "the people both of great and little renown" (the "People" photo-project), taken by Ildar Ziganshin along the whole length of the period.

Ildar ZIGANSHIN.
"PEOPLE"
Exhibition is open every day since 12.00 to 19.00.
Admission free.
Gallery "OkNo" in Internet: www.oknogallery.ru
Curator of gallery -- Svetlana Shlyapnikova

Studio of the New Play
"BABI (WOMEN)"
Stage director: Yelena Kalouzhskikh
Actress:
Yanina Krivospitskaya, Yulia Reznichenko,
Natalia Skolova, Alla Tochilkina

R.Prichard. Yard girl. April 21, 22
E.Narshi. Shadow of tree. April 27 >>>> Ticket
N.Sadur. Strange baba. May 16 >>>> Ticket
M.Ugarov. Kitchen of hags. May 23 >>>> Ticket