Artist Anne Bobroff-Hajal will lead a lively interactive tour through her satirical but deadly serious portrayals of Russian autocratic society across the centuries, from the Tsars down through wealthy princely families and impoverished nobility, to serfs and labor camp inmates, moving through history to Stalin's nomenclature and Putin's oligarchs.
Visitors are invited to dialogue with the history of Russia, whose “great and terrible projects” over centuries can also help us understand Putin’s invasion of Ukraine today. This exhibition sets the quiet resonance of day-to-day life on the periphery of the Russian Empire against the fevered aristocratic competition at its autocratic Moscow center.
Bobroff-Hajal’s large, comical but deadly serious, icon-like works, influenced by animation and graphic novels, contain hundreds of individually-painted, 3-inch high portraits of Russians from serfs to princes. Their stories are “narrated” by zany Tsarist "godparents,” across centuries of often brutal Tsarist and Soviet autocratic history, shaped by the specific geography on which they live.
