Event Horizons

The exhibition "Event Horizons" tells about the universality of the profession of an architect and destroys the commonplace notion that an architect only materialises the client's desire. The exhibition is based on a series of graphic black and white works "Weightlessness" (1998-2018). ), made in a mixed technique (pencil and ink, printing, applique, paper weaving), as well as works by Totan Kuzembaev from the collection of the Museum of Architecture, belonging to the period of "paper architecture" of the 1980s ("City", "Fish", "Cross"), including 7 sheets from the series "Information City" (1986-1990) - projects of bus stops and information towers for the city of Zelenograd. In each of the series the author shows himself as a philosopher, inventor and demiurge.

Totan's signature handwriting began to take shape many years ago, while he was still a child in the middle of the vast Kazakh steppe. From the cradle he saw the shanyrak - a black hole in the dome of the yurt, where the stars move in the night sky, and in the morning - a bright blue circle with dashes of traces from aeroplanes.

For thousands of years architects created "in the captivity of gravity", until at the beginning of the XX century the ideas of total transformation of cities inspired them to think about the development of airspace. Three decades later, scientists overcame the boundary of the Earth - a man in space! Architects of the Thaw period again turned to futuristic forms, but in the 1970s gravity finally won: heavy architecture leaves no chance, nailing buildings to the ground. On this fracture in the 1980s, the phenomenon of "Paper Architecture" was born among students of MARKhI. Then the last generation of architects of the passing millennium decides to radically reconsider creative boundaries and to ask questions: what can architecture be with other laws of physics, if these laws are enough just to imagine? It was at this time, after graduating from the Moscow Institute of Architecture, that Totan Kuzembaev found himself among the well-known Soviet "paper architects" in the West, confronting the lack of architectural practice and forced "type creation" in those years.