Exhibition: “If I Kept a Diary”
“If I Kept a Diary” takes its title from a notebook in which Bulat Galeev recorded ideas for future projects alongside poems and drawings. The exhibition moves beyond conventional biography to explore his creative world: a laboratory of experiments and reflections on creativity, perception and the relationship between people, nature and their surroundings.
The exhibition includes previously unpublished drawings by Bulat Galeev, his photographs, excerpts from slide-music films, personal belongings and recordings of his poetry.
Bulat Galeev’s drawings from the 1970s reveal the synthetic character of his practice. Lines, forms and spatial structures recur across different media. Drawing on painting, psychology, musicology and art history, he extended Alexander Scriabin’s ideas about uniting sound and image. His aim was to help people “see” music and discover new ways of perceiving the world.
Bulat Galeev described light music as an art of “intoned instrumental choreography”. For fifty years, he traced connections between music, painting, film and dance while developing an independent approach to technological art. Practice served as the test for his theoretical ideas.
