Empire's Echo - Artist Presentations & Discussion

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.

Campbell’s “Agit Kino: Tell Them We Are For Peace” focuses on Indigenous peoples of subarctic Siberia. The installation features historic photographs and a tent cinema inspired by the early 20th-century Agitprop tents used by itinerant Bolshevik projectionists to screen news, propaganda, and entertainment for nomadic peoples.

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.