Split Together, Merged Apart. Book Collection

The themes of the presented books—the history of the Soviet avant-garde, the role of documents in archaeology and art, the connection between society and the natural environment—highlight the importance of a meeting point between scientific thought and imagination. This convergence makes it possible to connect the present with a reconstructed past and an envisioned future.

Фото: Вадим Штэйн

Thinking Like an Archaeologist

In the exhibition, archaeology emerges as a special way of thinking—one that allows us to recognise in unearthed artefacts the traces of various processes: cultural, natural, economic, and climatic.

Until the Modern era, ruins of ancient structures were often seen not as sites of memory but rather as sources of building material. In Pamyat` i zabvenie ruin [The Memory and Oblivion of Ruins] (in Russian), cultural scholar and art historian Vladislav Degtyarev casts ruins as a philosophical tool that helps rethink familiar oppositions—past and present, natural and cultural, whole and fragmented. Their liminal state between forgetting and remembering makes them especially valuable for analysing cultural discontinuities and contemporary views of historical heritage.

Meanwhile, Sergey Tolstov’s 1948 work Drevnij Xorezm [Ancient Khorezm] (in Russian), the culmination of nearly thirty years of fieldwork, introduced one of Central Asia’s oldest civilisations into the global cultural context, placing it alongside Greece and Egypt. This work not only revealed a previously unknown stratum of history but also laid the foundation for a whole new academic discipline. Richly illustrated with maps and sketches, the book’s vivid authorial voice is perhaps best captured in this metaphor: “Before us lay the book of dead Khorezm—not written in ink, but in bricks and shards of pottery... a book we still had to learn how to read.”

The tradition of “viewing the world from above” began with the most famous of ancient maps, carved into rock over 2,500 years ago in the Camonica Valley. In Theatre of the World: The Maps that Made History (Russian edition), Thomas Reinertsen Berg turns the history of cartography into a story of human ingenuity, illustrative mistakes, and boundless imagination. Maps are inseparable not only from technology but also from economics, marketing, art, worldviews, and the ambitions of the societies that created them. Modern digital maps have transformed not just navigation but also how we perceive the planet, privacy, and data control.

Pratik Chakrabarti’s Inscriptions of Nature (Russian edition) explores the intertwined dynamics of nature, landscape, and history in India. He shows how conceptions of land, topography, and catastrophes shape national identity and self-awareness. His scholarly yet literary style reveals nature as a kind of textual archive—rocks, horizon lines, and even deserts bear the imprint of half-forgotten events that nonetheless shape collective memory.

In Andrea Ballestero’s A Future History of Water, water is presented as a critical factor in shaping civilisations and their future. Ballestero emphasises that the history of water is both a dream of technological omnipotence and a drama of irreversible loss. Science, culture, and economics intertwine throughout the book, yet at its core lies a persistent question: how can we rethink the human relationship with this vital resource in order to break the vicious cycle where modernisation often goes hand in hand with ecological catastrophe?

The Art of Reading and Observing

In the exhibition’s barrier-free space, artworks and archaeological finds coexist, highlighting their mutual influence. Contemporary artists often adopt an archaeological approach, extracting images and meanings from fragmented, scattered knowledge of reality.

In Optika dokumental`nosti [The Optics of Documentality] (in Russian), Tatiana Mironova analyses how artists working with archives, found images, and personal stories challenge the very concept of authenticity. They create works at the intersection of fact and fiction, unravelling the ideological, technical, and aesthetic “seams” of the document as a seemingly coherent unit. This shifts the focus from the event itself to the dynamic and contradictory process of interpretation, where omissions and gaps become as significant as facts.

Artist Alexandra Sukhareva, whose work is featured in the exhibition, reflects in her book Witness on one of her earlier projects about time. In it, observations of a decaying estate in Grebnevo, near Moscow, transform into a meditation on memory and the accidents that bind people to places. Two silver mirrors left among the ruins become “witnesses” to the space, and the events of their unexpected disappearance and subsequent rediscovery become part of the location’s memory and reshape its history.

Militsa Zemskaya’s Vremya v peskax [Time in the Sands] (in Russian) recounts her participation in the Khorezm Expedition and how this research radically changed her life, connecting her with the region’s culture and art. “Central Asia brought me back to life after the siege of Leningrad,” she recalled. “I always felt indebted to it.”

Yaffa Assouline’s Russian Avant-Garde: The Savitsky Hidden Collection of the Nukus Museum, 1900–1930 and Avant-Garde Orientalists: Tribute to Igor Savitsky are dedicated to the art collection assembled by Igor Savitsky—Soviet artist and art historian, a participant of the Khorezm Expedition and enthusiast of ancient ceramics restoration, who later became the saviour of many Soviet avant-garde works. In 1966, at his initiative, the State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan was founded in Nukus, now home to one of the world’s largest collections of Soviet “unofficial” art. Savitsky often expanded the collection using his own funds, concealing the artists’ names in official records. Assouline’s books demonstrate how one person’s efforts helped preserve the treasures of two major cultural legacies: ancient Khorezm and the artistic avant-garde.

Several books trace the profound transformations of Central Asia through its architecture and natural environment. The edition Desyat` maxallej [Ten Neighbourhoods] (in Russian) focuses on the traditional urban neighborhoods of Central Asia, functioning as local communities. This box-set release highlights their unique qualities in urban planning, customs, and social relationships. The album Soviet Asia: Soviet Modernist Architecture in Central Asia serves as a catalogue of photographs documenting modernist architecture in the countries of the former USSR, which became a symbol of the region’s social transformation in the twentieth century. The photo project Continental Drift by artists Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs is a visual diary documenting their journey from Switzerland to Ulaanbaatar. The authors created a series of photographs in which reality is often indistinguishable from fantasy: enigmatic landscapes, signs of various cultures, and their traditions.

The exhibition Split Together, Merged Apart follows the logic of archaeological analysis, where fragmented material requires imaginative reconstruction and reinterpretation. In turn, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Russian edition) offers a comparable lens through which to examine the most intimate and familiar of places—the home. For Bachelard, every space—from attic to basement, even a large closet or a staircase—serves as a detail in a broader picture filled with memories and phantasms. Philosophy, poetry, phenomenology, and art become tools for a researcher who transforms the house into an emotional landscape, and each of us into an archaeologist of our own memory.