From July 25 to January 8, 2022, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center hosts the photo exhibition A Sense of Home. The project presents the works of 12 photographers: Dima Zharov, Olga Isakson, Marina Merkulova, Daria Nazarova, Julia Nevskaya, Vladislav Nekrasov, Stanislava Novgorodtseva, Vladimir Sevrinovsky, Fyodor Telkov, Yuri Fokin, Stanislav Chekmaev, Anastasia Yakovitskaya. The exhibition is organized jointly with research project ‘Reserve’ (Public Opinion Foundation).
Each story presented in the exhibition will show how emotional connections are formed with the place a person calls home. Today, talking about home can become the focus of attempts to find enduring and universal personal meaning. At the same time, the word ‘home’ can mean a refuge — home to several generations of the family — baggage we carry around, a place of childhood memories collected inside us, or the hotel room we stayed in for just a few months.
Seventeen photo stories will take viewers to different parts of Russia; from the Gulf of Finland to Birobidzhan, from the Taimyr Peninsula to North Ossetia. The exhibition has five thematic sections:
• ancestral home
• nomadic houses
• nostalgia for home
• my home is your home
• sacred space
Ancestral Home
The first section is dedicated to those who live from generation to generation in one place, and also to people looking for their roots and ancestral homes today. The photo stories here explore the tribal towers of North Ossetia, the lives of the Chat people in Novosibirsk region, and of Russian Kazakhs in the Omsk region. A photo story was created specially for the exhibition on an ancestral home — a house in the Moscow region, owned by one family over decades.
Nomadic Houses
This part of the exhibition deals with people whose custom is to live without fixed houses: the nomads of Taimyr and Tyva, reindeer herders of the Komi Republic and the Roma people in Tula. The stories examine how and why even the most devoted nomads stop moving from place to place, settle down, send their children to school and gradually integrate into their local communities.
Nostalgia for Home
The third theme deals with immigrants and people forced to leave their homes — those who will always yearn for their historical homeland and preserve the memory of it. The photographers reconstruct the story of how villages were flooded to make the Rybinsk reservoir, explore the German community in Omsk who perpetuate their culture far away from Germany, and the Jewish people who settled in the far eastern Jewish Autonomous Region.
My Home is Your Home
This section looks at how people who move into another culture make it their own place. The stories examine this theme in a village on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, once home to the Ingrian people, and in restored Finnish houses in Karelia.
Sacred Space
The last section of the exhibition treats the theme of home as a sacred place. On the one hand, a temple can become a spiritual refuge while equally, an ordinary apartment or house often becomes a place of comfort and protection, like a temple. Viewers will see photo stories about the Old Believers Church in Vereya, Buddhist domestic altars in homes in Kalmykia, shamanic centers in Tuva. In this section we also learn about the Jewish center in Kostroma, where over the past century communal life around the local synagogue has experienced cycles of decline and revival.
Especially for the exhibition, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center prepared excursions for visitors with special needs: regular excursions in Russian sign language, excursions with audio descriptions, and tours facilitated for visitors with mental disabilities.
In addition, as part of the A Sense of Home public program, the Inclusive Practices Department, together with the Nochlezhka Charitable Organization, is organizing a series of public talks on homelessness stereotypes and their causes, as well as public projects to make people visible.
Photographers who created the series for the exhibition
Olga Isakson is a photographer from Moscow. She studied at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia in Moscow and the International Center of Photography (New York). Olga's interests lie in the fields of documentary and art photography, as reflected in her work for Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Achtung and other publications. Olga's projects Sunstroke and Journey were shown at in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Fashion and Style in Photography’ biennial, and her piece The Lonka Project: Numbered at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. Her works are in Moscow’s Multimedia Art Museum and private collections.
Daria Nazarova is a visual artist working with documentary and post-documentary photography. In 2015 she graduated from Ivanovo University with a degree in architecture. Nazarova is a Member of the Union of Photo Artists of Russia and in 2019 she graduated from the ‘Photographica’ Academy in St. Petersburg. Daria is interested in inherited memory, inter-generational ties, connections with place, identity and self-identification and horizontal communities. Her photographs and photobooks have been shown in national and international group exhibitions.
Stanislava Novgorodtseva is a documentary photographer from Moscow. She works with several Russian and foreign media outlets including Kommersant and RBC while concentrating on long-term personal projects. Novgorodtseva’s work is focused on ethnic identity, and the relationship between the personal and social. In search of a visual language, she often turns to archetypal images of fairy tales and mythology. A graduate of the School of Contemporary Photography Docdocdoc, Novogorodtseva has taken part in seminars including The Nikon-Noor Academy (Hungary) and The Eddie Adams Workshop (New York). She was a finalist in several international competitions and in 2019 she won the 2019 LensCulture Visual Storytelling Awards and the PHD Photography and Design Festival Grand Prix.
Fyodor Telkov is a photographer, artist and researcher of the anthropological and cultural diversity of Russia, in particular the Urals. Telkov explores how Russia’s most markedly post-industrial region is being documented, precisely during this post-industrial era. His work makes visible a mythology of the Urals, captured and transformed in timeless images. Telkov teaches graphic design and applied photography; a member of the Union of Artists of Russia since 2010, he was curator of the Metenkov House Museum of Photography (Yekaterinburg) from 2017–2021. Telkov has won international and national awards.
Zapovednik is a media project about memory and everyday life in the Russian regions (zapovednik.space), created in 2016 within the framework of the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM). The project team conducts field research and releases their results in the format of longreads, guidebooks and documentaries.
The Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) is one of Russia’s key sociological research agencies, producing case studies and conducting public opinion polling. This year it turns 30 years old.
Exhibition curator: Nina Gomiashvili, is an independent art curator
Exhibition time: July 25, 2022 — January 8, 2023
Location: Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center
Age limit: 6+
In cooperation with:
The project was implemented with the support of businessman and founder of the SAFMAR Charitable Foundation M.S. Gutseriev:
With the support of:
General information partner:
Information partners:
Each story presented in the exhibition will show how emotional connections are formed with the place a person calls home. Today, talking about home can become the focus of attempts to find enduring and universal personal meaning. At the same time, the word ‘home’ can mean a refuge — home to several generations of the family — baggage we carry around, a place of childhood memories collected inside us, or the hotel room we stayed in for just a few months.
Seventeen photo stories will take viewers to different parts of Russia; from the Gulf of Finland to Birobidzhan, from the Taimyr Peninsula to North Ossetia. The exhibition has five thematic sections:
• ancestral home
• nomadic houses
• nostalgia for home
• my home is your home
• sacred space
Ancestral Home
The first section is dedicated to those who live from generation to generation in one place, and also to people looking for their roots and ancestral homes today. The photo stories here explore the tribal towers of North Ossetia, the lives of the Chat people in Novosibirsk region, and of Russian Kazakhs in the Omsk region. A photo story was created specially for the exhibition on an ancestral home — a house in the Moscow region, owned by one family over decades.
Nomadic Houses
This part of the exhibition deals with people whose custom is to live without fixed houses: the nomads of Taimyr and Tyva, reindeer herders of the Komi Republic and the Roma people in Tula. The stories examine how and why even the most devoted nomads stop moving from place to place, settle down, send their children to school and gradually integrate into their local communities.
Nostalgia for Home
The third theme deals with immigrants and people forced to leave their homes — those who will always yearn for their historical homeland and preserve the memory of it. The photographers reconstruct the story of how villages were flooded to make the Rybinsk reservoir, explore the German community in Omsk who perpetuate their culture far away from Germany, and the Jewish people who settled in the far eastern Jewish Autonomous Region.
My Home is Your Home
This section looks at how people who move into another culture make it their own place. The stories examine this theme in a village on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, once home to the Ingrian people, and in restored Finnish houses in Karelia.
Sacred Space
The last section of the exhibition treats the theme of home as a sacred place. On the one hand, a temple can become a spiritual refuge while equally, an ordinary apartment or house often becomes a place of comfort and protection, like a temple. Viewers will see photo stories about the Old Believers Church in Vereya, Buddhist domestic altars in homes in Kalmykia, shamanic centers in Tuva. In this section we also learn about the Jewish center in Kostroma, where over the past century communal life around the local synagogue has experienced cycles of decline and revival.
Especially for the exhibition, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center prepared excursions for visitors with special needs: regular excursions in Russian sign language, excursions with audio descriptions, and tours facilitated for visitors with mental disabilities.
In addition, as part of the A Sense of Home public program, the Inclusive Practices Department, together with the Nochlezhka Charitable Organization, is organizing a series of public talks on homelessness stereotypes and their causes, as well as public projects to make people visible.
Photographers who created the series for the exhibition
Olga Isakson is a photographer from Moscow. She studied at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia in Moscow and the International Center of Photography (New York). Olga's interests lie in the fields of documentary and art photography, as reflected in her work for Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Achtung and other publications. Olga's projects Sunstroke and Journey were shown at in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Fashion and Style in Photography’ biennial, and her piece The Lonka Project: Numbered at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. Her works are in Moscow’s Multimedia Art Museum and private collections.
Daria Nazarova is a visual artist working with documentary and post-documentary photography. In 2015 she graduated from Ivanovo University with a degree in architecture. Nazarova is a Member of the Union of Photo Artists of Russia and in 2019 she graduated from the ‘Photographica’ Academy in St. Petersburg. Daria is interested in inherited memory, inter-generational ties, connections with place, identity and self-identification and horizontal communities. Her photographs and photobooks have been shown in national and international group exhibitions.
Stanislava Novgorodtseva is a documentary photographer from Moscow. She works with several Russian and foreign media outlets including Kommersant and RBC while concentrating on long-term personal projects. Novgorodtseva’s work is focused on ethnic identity, and the relationship between the personal and social. In search of a visual language, she often turns to archetypal images of fairy tales and mythology. A graduate of the School of Contemporary Photography Docdocdoc, Novogorodtseva has taken part in seminars including The Nikon-Noor Academy (Hungary) and The Eddie Adams Workshop (New York). She was a finalist in several international competitions and in 2019 she won the 2019 LensCulture Visual Storytelling Awards and the PHD Photography and Design Festival Grand Prix.
Fyodor Telkov is a photographer, artist and researcher of the anthropological and cultural diversity of Russia, in particular the Urals. Telkov explores how Russia’s most markedly post-industrial region is being documented, precisely during this post-industrial era. His work makes visible a mythology of the Urals, captured and transformed in timeless images. Telkov teaches graphic design and applied photography; a member of the Union of Artists of Russia since 2010, he was curator of the Metenkov House Museum of Photography (Yekaterinburg) from 2017–2021. Telkov has won international and national awards.
Zapovednik is a media project about memory and everyday life in the Russian regions (zapovednik.space), created in 2016 within the framework of the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM). The project team conducts field research and releases their results in the format of longreads, guidebooks and documentaries.
The Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) is one of Russia’s key sociological research agencies, producing case studies and conducting public opinion polling. This year it turns 30 years old.
Exhibition curator: Nina Gomiashvili, is an independent art curator
Exhibition time: July 25, 2022 — January 8, 2023
Location: Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center
Age limit: 6+
In cooperation with:
The project was implemented with the support of businessman and founder of the SAFMAR Charitable Foundation M.S. Gutseriev:
With the support of:
General information partner:
Information partners: