Featured Events in Saint Petersburg in September, 2024 (February Updated)

The display has been organized by the State Hermitage in conjunction with the Erebuni Historical and Archaeological Museum-Reserve and is the first exhibition under a collaboration agreement between the two museums. Over the course of a year, within the permanent display of the Oriental Department, visitors will be able to see a representational presence of the Erebuni museum and acquaint themselves with three exhibits from its stocks. A special place among these is taken by a basalt block bearing a cuneiform inscription of King Argishti I about the foundation of Erebuni.

The exhibition is dedicated to one of the most important events in anyone's life. Weddings have long been considered not only a family, but also a public occasion, and therefore require compliance with a set of rules established in the early 19th century, which have hardly changed since then. The outward features of a Russian wedding are various elements of the bride's and groom's attire, gifts, dowry and icons. Such exhibits from the State Hermitage stock make it possible to see objects that many years ago accompanied lovers through the happiest period of their lives.The wedding was preceded by a betrothal or engagement ceremony. The exhibition includes a dress that the future Princess Yusupova Zinaida Ivanovna Naryshkina wore on her betrothal, as well as icons used to bless the bride and groom.

On 27 July 2023, the exhibition “Beauty as Rhythm: Female Figures in the Collection of Traditional African Art of the State Hermitage Museum” begins its run in the General Staff building.The display features five wooden statues of women that belong to three different African cultures – Dan, Bamana (or Bambara) and Mossi – and date from around the turn of the 20th century. Such sculptural depictions had both aesthetic and magical significance in the communities where they were created. In the Bamana culture, they were involved in male initiation rites and conveyed the most prominent features of an ideal woman – an oversized bust, coiffured hair and jewellery. Among the Mossi, they were produced for girls entering puberty. They could dress these figurines (in essence dolls), adorn them and anoint them with oil. Taking care of them became a compulsory practice for girls entering into womanhood. Researchers term African statuettes of this kind “fertility figures” and their function is always bound up with the power of the feminine, the birth-giving, creative principle. One of the figures included in the exhibition, for example, depicts a woman with a child on her back. In this way, the sculptor focusses attention on the main female social role – motherhood. The creators of the exhibition invite us to look at these objects as works of art capable of telling us about a different conception of beauty, one to which Europeans are unaccustomed. Strict realism is something alien to the African artists: they strive to convey meanings by different means. Beauty, in this instance, lies not in the harmony of specific features, but in correspondence to some ideal, to the archetype of the essentially feminine. That is created, first and foremost, with the aid of rhythm. As Léopold Sédar Senghor, the French and Senegalese politician, poet and philosopher wrote: “For an African, a beautiful statue is one that evokes particular emotions in him. Here, for example, I have before me a statuette of the Dogon people. It does not in the least resemble an image of a beautiful woman, but this statuette of a seated woman is captivating, because it is imbued with rhythm.”

The exhibition “He Conquered Both Time and Space...” organized by the Russian Museum in the halls of the Stroganov Palace is timed to the 225th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin’s birth. This is the first ever large-scale exhibition held in the Russian Museum to address the genius of Russian and world culture, whose anniversary will be an international event. The exhibition presents an unprecedented number of exhibits – more than three hundred works of painting, sculpture, graphic, decorative, applied and folk arts exclusively from the collection of the Russian Museum. The museum rich depositories enable to characterize the oeuvre of the great writer most fully and diversely and to reconstruct the cultural and historical background, which witnessed the formation and heyday of Pushkin’s unique talent. The show is dedicated to the poet’s characters, contemporaries and descendants. The artistic material presented at the exhibition dates back to the 18th–20th centuries.

“The Hermitage’s Carl Fabergé Rooms preserve the memory of the court jeweller and Hermitage restorer and are intended to stimulate both the study of his legacy and the development of the traditions that he established. It is this purpose that is served by the collection of works by modern-day gemstone-carvers, superb artists with fine taste, that we are presenting today,” Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented. The display tells about the creative endeavours of modern-day artists, their experiments in working with semiprecious stones and their striving to combine the achievements of their predecessors with fresh tendencies. The exhibition features more than 35 works that bring together original ideas and a subtle feel for the material, professional execution and virtuoso technical approaches. The creators of the majority of the works are gemstone-carvers based in Saint Petersburg. Also on show in the hall are pieces made by present-day German craftspeople, representatives of the oldest school of European gemstone-carving art located in the town of Idar-Oberstein.

The State Russian Museum and the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus open the unprecedented exhibition Russia and Belarus: Crossed Destinies. The Marble Palace presents works by Belarusian artists who graduated from Russian art schools and whose art became the world heritage. The masters often received their professional education in Moscow and St Petersburg, belonged to the same art associations and generally adhered to a single tradition. At the same time, their work retained national features, views of native nature, national heroes and types.

November 2023 marks the 175th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Russian orientalist, historian and archaeologist Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky (1848-1918). He was a man who left an important mark on Russian scholarship with his works on the history and archaeology of Central Asia, the Golden Horde and the northern Black Sea region, as well as works on the history of Oriental studies and archaeology in the country. The exhibition includes more than 200 unique exhibits describing the sites and archaeological cultures discovered by Veselovsky - the Maikop and Scythian cultures, artifacts from the "Golden Cemetery", the medieval Belorechensk necropolis and other places. The objects selected for the exhibition are the most important of the excavations and purchases carried out by this scholar, who systematically acquired antiquities for the Imperial Archaeological Commission. The main focus is on presenting little-known or completely unknown objects. The exhibition is also accompanied by copies of documents (including some previously unpublished documents) and pictorial reconstructions from the research archives of the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The exhibition will acquaint visitors with the main milestones in the life and service of the great Russian poet. The career of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803–1873) as a state official of the Russian Empire can be traced through reproductions of historical materials. The stands carry portraits of Tyutchev himself and members of his family as well as outstanding statemen of the period, along with passages from his poetry and letters.

It is dedicated to three important dates: the 160th anniversary of the birth of Central Asian traveler and explorer Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov (1863-1935), the 100th anniversary of the Mongol-Tibetan expedition and the 100th anniversary of the start of scientific research on the archaeological site of Noin Ula. The exhibition "Archaeological Phenomena. Between Past and Future" presents the most interesting findings and the latest laboratory research results. Unique ancient artifacts, historical documents and photographs related to the research of Noin Ula tombs are exhibited in the exhibition halls.

“Ilya Kabakov is perhaps the only Russian artist of the second half of the 20th century to have become a generally acknowledged world great. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov were all but the only people in the Western world to speak out publicly against breaking ties with Russian cultural institutions. In the General Staff building the total installation devoted to Soviet civilization has consonances with the displays devoted to the history of the previous – imperial – Russian civilization. Its protagonist, however, is the little man, the successor to personages from Gogol and Dostoyevsky,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are famous Conceptualist artists who have gone down in history as the creators of a new genre – the total installation. It is an artistic space filled with a specific atmosphere, a separate environment in which everything – not just individual objects, but also their surroundings, the colour and configuration of the walls, lighting, sound and smells – takes on fresh meanings and serves to intensify the image devised by the creators. The total installation “Monument to a Lost Civilization” became one of the largest in the Kabakovs’ oeuvre. It was produced and first shown by its creators in Palermo in 1999. The total installation takes the form of the design for a utopian museum-city, something of which the artists had dreamed for many years. It was conceived as a memorial to the civilization in which they were born and spent the greater part of their lives – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Like archaeologists, the Kabakovs collected, described and systematized “shards” of that no longer extant civilization in their full-scale installations. Drawing on their personal experience and recollections, they designed their museum in such a way that, wandering through its various installation-rooms, viewers who had never seen that civilization would be able to form their own conception of it.

The word ‘tidings’ appeared a long time ago, yet it is quite relevant to modern life filled with various kinds of news. The exhibition is devoted to the issues of transmitting and receiving information, its reliability and deceptiveness. The exhibition features 12 sections: Letter; Message as a Ritual; Newspaper; Radio; Telephone; Television; Letters, Codes, and Ciphers; Gossip, Rumours, and Misinformation; Messages from Space; Messengers; Signal; Digital World. The artists are more interested not in the technological aspects of communication processes but rather in humanistic ones. All the works are united by the motif of tidings – news – messages.

27 November 2023 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Grigory Vasilyev, a serf artist commonly known by his nickname Soroka. He was a serf of the Milyukov landowners who lived in Ostrovki estate, Vyshny Volochyok District, Tver Province. Alexei Venetsianov, an academician and painter, famous for his commitment to the teaching of young artists, lived nearby – in Safonkovo estate. Grigory Soroka became one of his last favourite students. Unfortunately, he benefited from Venetsianov’s advice and patronage for quite a short time – from 1843 to 1847. After the death of his teacher, Grigory Soroka continued to make a living from art but, over time, most of his works lost their attribution and became part of the numerous anonymous works created by Venetsianov’s students.

The exhibition at the Marble Palace brings together about 100 works of painting, graphic and applied arts on the Cossack theme from the collection of the Russian Museum. It includes portraits, landscapes and works on historical subjects by Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov, Valentin Serov, Vasily Surikov, Alexei Venetsianov, Aleksander Orłowski and other outstanding masters of Russian art.