Prometheus of the Space Age: Bulat Galeev at 80
Bulat Galeev’s career is an exceptional example of an artist realising experimental ideas within a scientific and educational institution. In Soviet culture, science and art were usually treated as separate fields. A small number of enthusiasts brought them together in projects that helped establish contemporary media art.
Prometheus — the mythological protector who gave fire to humanity — became the title of Alexander Scriabin’s pioneering composition with a part for light. The problem of how to perform that part later preoccupied many Soviet experimenters and prompted sustained debate.
The Kazan Prometheus collective became a meeting point for Soviet artists, musicians and engineers interested in synthesis. Bulat Galeev created a close network in which people who associated music and poetry with colour could exchange ideas.
Bulat Galeev also developed an unusually international network. Through correspondence, he exchanged ideas with artists in many countries and did not see Kazan as isolated from global culture. Documents and infographics in the exhibition reconstruct this network and show how it helped make the city a centre for contemporary art.
The exhibition includes more than one hundred objects, models, films and documents connected with Prometheus. It also presents work by Konstantin Vasiliev, Nadir Almeev, Oleg Sokolov, Alexey Anikeenok and Vyacheslav Koleichuk, all of whom communicated or collaborated with Bulat Galeev.
A central work is a reconstructed light-kinetic model for a building dedicated to revolutionary art. Grigory Gidoni designed it in 1927; Bulat Galeev initiated its first reconstruction for the 1987 exhibition “Grigory Gidoni’s Monument to the Revolution”. That festival exhibition took place in the same gallery that now hosts “Prometheus of the Space Age”.
The exhibition presents paintings from the Konstantin Vasiliev Museum (Kazan), as well as private collections.
Exhibition partners: the Smena Centre for Contemporary Culture, Creeptone Media and the “Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation for the Support of Audiovisual and Technological Art.
Press-release text based on material by Kirill Svetlyakov and Yanina Prudenko.
