On 12 December, a private literary museum dedicated to the OBERIU* movement opened in St. Petersburg in the restored apartment of poet Alexander Vvedensky on Syezhinaya Street.
The opening of the museum and the exhibition ‘The Rooms of OBERIU’ was a large-scale performance that began on the street and continued inside the apartment. The whole day was divided into sessions, after each of which a solemn ceremony was held in the courtyard to install a temporary monument to the participants of the OBERIU movement.
The first monument to be unveiled was to Alexander Vvedensky, followed by monuments to Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Oleinikov, and Yakov Druskin, which were installed on pedestals throughout the day.
Alexandra Gart, an artist at Anna Nova Gallery, presented the installation ‘Monument to All OBRIUTS.’ Alexandra often refers to the work of Daniil Kharms and his absurd poems.
Since the avant-garde work of the OBERIU artists proved too radical and they were practically not allowed to publish, they turned to children's literature, paying particular attention to games in which children easily manipulate both objects and abstract concepts and meanings.
My idea of a ‘monument’ — although I would not call it a monument, but rather a commentary or an illustration — in the form of an old children's swing, non-functional — either broken or existing in another time and frozen in its aspiration towards the sky — on the border between joy and horror — seems quite justified conceptually" says Alexandra Gart.
* OBERIU (Association of Real Art) — a group of writers and cultural figures that existed in Leningrad from 1927 to the early 1930s. The group included Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Konstantin Vaginov, Yuri Vladimirov, Igor Bakhterev, and Doivber Levin.
