Poor Relics: Political Imprisonment on Display

• In Event: Narratives of Trial and Imprisonment in Russian and Soviet Culture from the 1920s to the 2020s

Abstract

I will discuss the strategies of displaying material relics from the archives of political prisoners. How could fetters and other instruments of torture, decayed thread-bare clothing, and primitive everyday tools, fashioned out of materials available in captivity, be presented in a way that fully uses their evidentiary, as well as instructional potential? What are the exhibition practices for making these relics from the archives of the repressed speak? What is the political potential of the often heightened, tactile faktura of these objects––faktura that could all too easily be aestheticized in the eyes of contemporary viewers? In my presentation I will focus on two exhibitions, almost one hundred years apart: on the displays of the artifacts of the pre-1917 political prisoners in the Moscow Museum of Revolution in the 1920s (before the museum was brought under a close control of the Bolshevik Party), and on “Material: Women’s Memory of the GULAG”—the last exhibition that was organized by the Memorial Society before its dissolution in 2021.

Author

• Anastasiya Osipova, U of Colorado at Boulder