The exhibition Presnya: Exhibition of My Memory presents the Presnya district at the intersection of cultural, geographical and personal coordinates. Items from state museums and residents’ personal diaries, photographs of significant events and newsreel footage, works by artists of the 1960s and contemporary creators have been brought together to form a single visual narrative. The district is not shown as a collection of local history landmarks, but as an image shaped by the memories of those who have lived there.

The exhibition is divided into thematic sections: You Are Here, Industrial Presnya, Green Presnya, Presnya Burning and Shot, and The Faraway Presnya. Its narrative follows a non-linear approach, in which real time and space are intertwined, altered and reimagined, guided more by dramatic structure than by chronological order or geography. The neighbourhood’s rich history is revealed through the lens of everyday life and the personal experience of inhabiting the space, so Presnya appears in the exhibition in two registers: real and imagined.

The exhibition brings together more than 350 items from the collections of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, the Dal State Museum of the History of Russian Literature, the Timiryazev State Biological Museum, the Gorki Leninskiye State Historical Museum-Reserve, the Manege Museum and Exhibition Association, the Mayakovsky State Museum, the Vladimir Vysotsky State Museum, the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg, the Multimedia Art Museum, the AZ Museum, the Ruarts Foundation, and the MIRA Collection, the Still Art Foundation, and others, as well the Romanovskaya School and various private collections.

Among the exhibits, which serve as markers of significant places and events in Presnya’s history, visitors can see fabrics produced by the Trekhgornaya Manufactory; dyes by Lyudmila Mayakovskaya, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s elder sister and the first woman to hold an administrative and technical post at the factory before the revolution; a detailed model of Georgy Marsakov’s Bread Factory with interior reconstructions; fossils from the ancient Moscow Sea; embroideries from Pyotr Shchukin’s mansion, and many other artefacts. Memories of local residents were sourced through the Prozhito (Lived) project and recorded as part of the Artist’s Photobook Lab held at the Zotov Centre under the curatorship of Alla Mirovskaya.

The exhibition features works by contemporary artists Artem Filatov, MishMash, Alexei Luka, Alexander Brodsky and Ivan Lungin. Unofficial art is represented by works of iconic figures such as Ilya Kabakov, Vadim Sidur, Oleg Vasiliev, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Dmitry Plavinsky, Valery Yurlov, Anatoly Zverev, Eduard Steinberg, Vladimir Nemukhin and Mikhail Shvartsman.

Curators: architect and Zotov Centre curator Anna Zamriy, and curator and researcher Alla Mirovskaya.
Exhibition architecture: Alexei Tregubov.