A Guide to Berlin
Installation Art Exhibition by Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov
(Germany, 2014)
The following short film highlights the project by twins, Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov (born in 1973, Leningrad), working as an artist duo in the border region between painting and installation. After finishing school in St. Petersburg, they set off to survey the world together. Stops in New York, Paris, and Hamburg — lasting several years each — led them finally to Berlin, where they live today represented by Wagner+Partner Gallery.
Their works give us a glimpse into how the world must look to two people whose lives are intimately connected, a motif familiar to the readers of Nabokov’s fiction. The Petschatnikovs choose to focus on seemingly insignificant phenomena that are part of our daily lives: their installation, A Guide to Berlin, at first appears to be a strikingly visual collage of heterogeneous motifs from a street scene — with transport, graffiti, and pigeons — but then turns out to be also an exploration of the destabilizing effects of exile and loss. This project was inspired by Nabokov’s early short story, “A Guide to Berlin” (1925), which “playfully bypasses grandiose tourist sites in favor of icons of the humble and everyday – trams, pubs, street pipes – the artists create a reconfigurable installation that both pays homage to Nabokov’s icons and builds a new vocabulary of neglected markers of Berlin’s present” (Donna Stonecipher).
The short film, directed by Yuri Leving, features archival footage, an interview with Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov in their German studio, as well as contemporary Berlin cityscape and its distinctly Nabokovian genius loci.
Their works give us a glimpse into how the world must look to two people whose lives are intimately connected, a motif familiar to the readers of Nabokov’s fiction. The Petschatnikovs choose to focus on seemingly insignificant phenomena that are part of our daily lives: their installation, A Guide to Berlin, at first appears to be a strikingly visual collage of heterogeneous motifs from a street scene — with transport, graffiti, and pigeons — but then turns out to be also an exploration of the destabilizing effects of exile and loss. This project was inspired by Nabokov’s early short story, “A Guide to Berlin” (1925), which “playfully bypasses grandiose tourist sites in favor of icons of the humble and everyday – trams, pubs, street pipes – the artists create a reconfigurable installation that both pays homage to Nabokov’s icons and builds a new vocabulary of neglected markers of Berlin’s present” (Donna Stonecipher).
The short film, directed by Yuri Leving, features archival footage, an interview with Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov in their German studio, as well as contemporary Berlin cityscape and its distinctly Nabokovian genius loci.
