Permanent exhibition Sea of Opportunities in The Children’s Museum in the Tretyakov Gallery Kaliningrad Branch.
From the perspective of architecture, composition, design and settings, The Children’s Museum is a complex, multilayered project. The curator of the project Marina Matskevich suggested to compare the creative process of making art and living life. Simultaneously taking on the role of artchitects and curators for this project, PSCulture Studio was looking for a spacial solution for such comparison.
When entering the space, children see a sea of opportunities. Such is also the name of the exposition: Sea of Opportunities. Young visitors set sail and embark on a journey of life, and the horizon is clear, like on the painting by Egor Plotnikov. They realise their position at the point of having a free choice. For an architect the connection between making a piece of art and plans of one’s life is very important.
And just like children make plans, an artist composes an artwork with sketches. The first part of the exhibition is dedicated to this exact idea — making of a composition, relations between lines, dots and spaces, light and shade. It is followed by a section allocated for materials, which covers textures and media — everything that is used when making an artwork. Not only paints or canvas, gypsum, wood or marble but also digital media. This is where Platon Infante’s multimedia piece that connects digital images on a screen with physical objects and The Blue Noses video Sea… is located. The culmination of the exposition is the section where colours, shades and depth appear. There at the end are based three works by Rostan Tavasiev. Toy elephant, monkey and lama become the characters/makers on the bright canvases.
A vision of art flashes through everything, like a lifebuoy. It is one of those metaphors that a circular space alludes to. Besides this, a circular motion is an image of round ripples diverging on water from a thrown stone, an image of a sea, journey, meetings, and discovery of the world. Thus the architects strived to show that art can be fun, full of life, unusual. And museum — is not about the “gloomy, serious and boring” but about the “interesting, fun and unexpected”.