ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Pushkin House is proud to announce our first online exhibition, COSMOS: Reverse Perspective, by Liz Davis, Fred Scott, Gleb Sobolev and Marina Sokolova, curated by Pierre d’Avoine and Gleb Sobolev, co-curated by Anna Gorskaya. The exhibition is supported by the Nikolai Fedorov Library (Moscow), the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky House-Museum (Kaluga), and the Museum of the First Flight (Gagarin).
"Our vastness serves as a transition to the vastness of the heavenly space, this new field for a great feat," wrote Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), the father of Russian cosmism, a philosophical exploration of space that took place before the technology to reach it had even been developed. The predictions about space and life in zero gravity of his contemporary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) grew out of the history of the development of the Russian steppes, with its snows and frosts, endless spaces that have shaped the culture of the peoples living on it.
At the opening event on 12th April we learned about the works in the exhibition from each of the artists and curators, along with an introduction to Russian cosmism from Anastasia Gacheva, filmed at the site of Gagarin’s monument in Moscow, and an address from the great-granddaughter of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky speaking from his house-museum. Further events included three films about space by Stella Scott and Dan Canyon (20th April); a discussion between cosmonaut Sergey Avdeev, geographer Dmitri Zamyatin and space psychologist Dr Iya Whiteley (27th April); a Q&A on the way meridians and imaginary lines define human interactions with space, with academic Yehuda Safran and Michał Milczarek (11th May).
Finally, 18th May marked the 60th anniversary of the first flyby of Venus by a man-made object, the Soviet Venera-1 probe, and we be celebrating that with a closing discussion with Yehuda Safran, anthropologist Tim Ingold and psychologist Vadim Ryabikov, as well as three short films responding to the themes of the show.
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