Professor Thomas Werner is currently working on an exhibition titled, Aliosha Groshok, A Contemporary Interpretation Of Lev Tolstoy; that will be mounted in New York this October, and will then travel to the Krasnoyarsk Museum in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, this November. Followed by exhibitions in Novosibirsk, Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russia early next year.
This is a student-centered exhibition for which students from Parsons, Lang, and International Student Services, as well as students from Russian art education programs across central and western Russia are being asked to create a photograph or video based on a single short story by Lev Tolstoy. Each student is being asked to interpret the story Aliosha Groshok (see here) in a contemporary context with an eye toward the resonance or manifestation of the themes Tolstoy addresses as they apply to contemporary culture. The relevance of the story within your personal life, and America’s current socio-political situation are also themes central to the work that you are being asked to produce. Students in both countries have been asked to work only in the mediums of photography and video.
To date student imagery has been collected from; Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Petrozavodsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Perm, Khanty Mansiysk, Ekaterinburg and Kaliningrad, Russia.
The exhibition will accompany an international symposium titled “Tolstoy In The Twenty First Century”, to be convened at The New School’s Eugene Lang College in commemoration of the centenary of Tolstoy’s death (1910-2010), and attended by the leading Tolstoy experts from around the world. Conference organizer and Tolstoy expert Inessa Medzhibovskaya conferred with other leading Tolstoy scholars and specialists in the humanities who will be participating in the conference and with Thomas Werner, a professor at Parsons who is conducts his research in Russia, regarding the best short story for the project, the final selection was Aliosha Gorshok.
All submissions must be sent to TolstoyProject@gmail.com, or given to Thomas Werner by 5pm, September 22nd, 2010. This is a firm deadline. Between 15 and 20 students from Russian and 15 to 20 student from The New School will be chosen from the submissions received.
The work must be delivered as follows: A digital file, 300dpi, Tiff or Jpeg (Tiff files are preferred) no larger than 16 x 20 inches, and no smaller than, 11 x 14 inches, OR a video as QuickTime or .mov file that is not more than 3 minutes long.
If you have any questions, please write to TolstoyProject@gmail.com.
