The STaTe hermiTage muSeum annual reporT

temporary exhIbItIons
1 August
Introduction of the Veni, Vidi, Vici crossword-guide to the
exhibition French Art of the 17th and 18th Centuries from the
Hermitage. The crossword-guide was a sort of analogue of
a guided tour for every visitor to the museum. It made
it possible for each visitor to converse, ask questions, solve
puzzles, notice subtleties and make discoveries. On the
one hand the visitor was independent, but on the other
hand was drawn into a scenario of a dialogue with an object
in the museum as conceived by the author.
9 August
Opening of the exhibition The Changing Image of Changing
Fashion from the collection of the “Moscow House of Photography”
Museum, organized as part of the France – Russia
Year. The exhibition included 53 photographs by two
well-known French photo graphers – Gerard Uferas and
Francoise Uguet, capturing the most interesting moments
in the history of French fashion houses.
24 August
Hermitage assembly to mark the Centre’s fifth anniversary.
The following programmes were based on materials in the
exhibition French Art of the 17th and 18th Centuries from the
Hermitage:
• Interactive guided tour Close Your Eyes and See. Museum
atmosphere, bandage over your eyes, the guide’s voice
letting you switch off from what is going on around you,
enter into a dialogue with the artist and understand the
codes and symbols in his work.
• Interactive tour-game French Hat Festival. In each room,
after viewing the exhibits, specific tasks were set (searching
for fragments of works of art in the display, learning
the purpose of objects from a bygone age, getting to know
an old French game and the language of the fan). After
completing it, children won playing bonuses (flowers),
to decorate the main prize – a hat.
• Practical session Lesson in Cryptography – addendum to
the guided tour of the exhibition. The political history
of Europe was awash with diplomatic intrigues. Important
letters were written in invisible ink. Each correspondent
had a whole chemical laboratory in his writing-desk, with
lecTure hall
of The hermiTage • KaZan cenTre
In the five years that the lecture hall in Kazan has been
in operation Hermitage staff have given over 360 lectures,
but it is more than a matter of numbers. There are two
main results of the lecture hall’s activity, two main conclusions
drawn by the staff of the Kazan Centre – the or-
the aim of being able to read the real message behind the
meaningless lines. At the end of the guided tour visitors
discovered the secret of cryptography.
• Thematic guided tour Plate with a Gold Edge, based on materials
in the exhibition. The tour described the 300-year
history of Sévres porcelain – everyday items that always
arouse admiration and are leading examples of decorative
applied art.
11–12 September
Exhibition project The Digital Tower, part of the “Kremlin
Live 2010” Festival.
Exhibition by the contemporary Dutch artist Pauline
Olteiten. Five video works entitled Collection of an Observer
demonstrated documentary film sessions – not staged
by the artist, but scenes observed by chance.
Demonstration of works by the Orenburg video artist Kit
Plekhanov entitled Digital Generative Art, featuring the pulsation
of complex multicoloured patterns on the walls
of the Tainitskaya Tower. GrrrBzzz, a programme of electronic
music by Muscovite Alexander Sinyagin, accompanied
the video showing.
13 October
Opening of an exhibition by diploma-winners at the 8th
“Russian Art Week” International Festival-Competition
of Contemporary Art.
29 October
Individual exhibition by the artist-sculptor Mahmut Gasimov
to mark his 65th birthday.
27 November
Opening of an exhibition of works by pupils of the Hermitage
• Kazan Centre’s children’s art studio, including watercolours,
collages and large installations on the themes
of exhibitions from the State Hermitage.
15 December
Opening of the exhibition A Silver Christmas. The Art of Jewellers
from Krasnoye Selo
ganizers of the lecture programme and the staff of the
Special Programmes Sector of the Hermitage Education
Department responsible for devising programmes and
training lecturers: firstly, in the words of the Centre’s staff,
“The Hermitage has brought lectures back to Kazan” – this
type of contact of science and art with the general public
was apparently forgotten completely since the early 1990s;
secondly, in those five years an essentially “Kazan” lecture
programme has been created – an organizational, rich
in content and methodical formula for a lecture theatre of
Hermitage standard has been found, meeting the conditions,
cultural needs and perception of the Kazan public.
The Hermitage lecture programme in Kazan was
launched in 2005, immediately after the Centre opened.
The first season was the most difficult, throwing up numerous
problems on both sides. The people of Kazan
had actually forgotten what a public lecture in a museum
was. The general public in the city did not respond to invitations
to the lectures – advertising had no effect, tickets
and subscriptions remained unsold. And the lecture
hall’s staff did not see any way of organizing it other than
to distribute advertisements to educational establishments
and appealing to teachers to bring their students
to the lecture hall. As a result, Hermitage lecturers were
faced with the necessity of giving lectures according to an
academic, educational method, essentially simply replacing
educational programmes in schools and colleges with
Hermitage lectures, which contradicted the very essence
of museum education and the method of public lectures
in museums. However, even the direct transfer to the Kazan
lecture hall of the Hermitage’s lecturing method and
the principle of compiling large series of lectures with
a common general theme, stretched out over the whole
season and even spilling over into the next, which is customarily
successful in the Hermitage, proved fairly unproductive
here in Kazan. What was necessary was a lengthy
collaboration based primarily on the common desire of
the Hermitage and the Centre to find a mutual understanding
and compile a programme of lectures and make
them an effective, necessary and interesting part of the
Hermitage’s activity in Kazan. The constant contact and
co-operation between the Hermitage staff and the Kazan
Centre was expressed not only in agreeing subjects, periods
and schedules, but above all in a careful study of
the interests and requirements of the potential Kazan
audience. In 2007 the Hermitage’s Sociological Sector
devised a questionnaire that became the basis of regular
public opinion polls conducted by the Centre’s staff.
The opinions expressed in the questionnaires, systematic
polls carried out once a season, round table discussions,
meetings of staff of the Hermitage and the Centre with
members of the audience, direct contact between Hermitage
lecturers and the public – all this became an essential
source of information, on the basis of which the
system of thematic programmes, the method and organization
of lectures were devised and adjusted.
Colleagues from Kazan who worked extensively and actively
with the people of Kazan were able to establish various
links with them. They not only consolidated and significantly
broadened links with the teacher-student audience
of Kazan, which now forms almost half of the lecture hall’s
regular audience. They also managed to attract middleaged
Kazan residents, the city’s intelligentsia, with which
temporary exhIbItIons
the Centre’s staff maintain contact not only by conventional
means – through advertisements, newspapers, radio and
cultural institutions, but also by direct personal contact
with almost every member of the audience.
What we now have, it seems to us, is a schedule of lectures
that is as convenient as possible for the Kazan audience
and the Hermitage. The Hermitage lecture programme
operates in the Kazan Centre for three successive days every
month, two lecturers from the Hermitage giving two lectures
each per day. There are fewer lectures in comparison
with the difficult first season of 2005/06 (72 as opposed
to 120), but the number of listeners has increased from
2,600 in the first season to nearly 4,000 in 2009/10. And in
just the first two sessions of the 2010/11 season (two trips)
in October and November 1,600 people have already attended
lectures.
The principles for forming the thematic programmes of
lectures were substantially different from those traditionally
followed by the Hermitage; they took into account
the schedule, the conditions of work, the make-up and
needs of the audience. Above all, we dispensed with large
comprehensive cycles of lectures. The basic “module” for
drawing up the programmes was a cycle of three lectures
on one subject by one lecturer, which could be given on
one visit to Kazan (each lecture twice). A mini-cycle such
as this could stand alone or could be correlated with another
three-lecture cycle on a related subject by another
lecturer.
The choice of subjects for the Kazan audience is always
a matter of serious work. We study the needs of the audience
and the suggestions of the Hermitage • Kazan Centre,
and without fail relate these to the specifics of the Hermitage’s
academic and educational activity. The themes of our
lectures are always the history of art and artistic culture.
Matters of socio-political history and religion are subjects
frequently requested by our Kazan listeners – they are seen
not as independent subjects but only in the context of the
history of art and culture. Each season’s programme includes
a cycle on the latest Hermitage exhibition staged
in the Centre.
Five years is not a long time – it is just a beginning that
has enabled us to acquire positive experience, leading
us to hope for the successful future development of the
Hermitage lecture hall, which has “brought lectures back
to Kazan”.
By Ludmila Torshina
Head of the Special Programmes Sector
Education Department, State Hermitage Museum
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