Like a Merry-Go-Round in Childhood is a painterly series about haunted memories of Soviet childhood on the borderline of reminiscence and imagination. The series is based on contextual research and a reinterpretation of three documents: a film, a found photo and an architectural ruin.
Oh, That Nastya! (1972). is a Soviet film for schoolchildren that was produced in 1972. The film's main conflict is built around the borderline between imaginary and real. A girl lives within a circle of her home, school and a Palace of Pioneers. She tells stories. In her fantasies, she meets a panther and a forest deer, whom she begs to take her away in a “wonderful deer-land”. Her stories are laughed at by her classmates and teacher and marked as “lies” inappropriate for a “true Soviet pioneer”. A very famous Soviet pop “Forest Deer Song” originates from the film.
A photo was found in an abandoned house and was shot in 1971 on a Soviet resort, called “Place of Deers”. It represents a girl, on a prop deer. Standard resort photo with detail - the girl’s bodily language indicates that she was made to sit on the creature and been captured.
INION RAS building is a typical piece of Soviet Modernism, constructed in 1969. State Archives and Humanitarian Sciences Library occupied it till 2015 when a building burnt down in an accident.
