Museum Museum of B. U. Kashkin

Museum of B. U. Kashkin (real name Yevgeny Mikhailovich Malaknin, 1938–2005), a legendary figure and an outstanding personality of 1970s–1990s Ural underground art, People’s Street Sweeper of Russia and punk-rock-skomorokh, was opened on December 19, 2008, in the main building of Ural State University named after A. M. Gorky (today Ural Federal University, UrFU), in a former bomb shelter of this Soviet bureaucratic-style building, which has been transformed into a small artistic space.

Very quickly this unusual museum, created within an academic institution by the faculty and students of the Department of Art History and Sociocultural Technologies, has become an experimental creative laboratory, initiating exhibition, artistic and interdisciplinary projects, serving as a research base, a center for collector work and educational activities, workshops and research seminars, round tables and conferences.

The core of the emerging museum collection has been formed by the artefacts (objects from “Iconoplastics” series, “morally-chopping boards”, hand-made painted musical instruments), audio- and video-materials, experimental photographs and photo books, anti-alcohol posters, whimsical wooden and paper artistic books, and samizdat — all contributed either permanently or temporarily by the artist’s widow Valeria Malakhina, his son Yaroslav Minullin, his grandson Dmitry Timokhin, as well as his friends Eduard Polenets, Ivan Ryzhkov, Aleksandra Krivolutskaya and others. Gradually, the museum collection has been expanding to include works of other members of Sverdlovsk underground (Nikolay Fedoreyev, Igor Shurov, Viktor Goncharov, Yevgeny Arbenev, Vladimir Zhukov and others) and Ural’s naive artists, with the development of digital catalogue and an archive
of regional unofficial art.

The museum’s permanent and temporarily exhibitions are open to the widest audience, “from young pioneers to pensioners” as Makakhin himself liked to say. By telling about its central character — not an artist in a classical meaning of this term (B. U. Kashkin never painted any pictures) — the museum exhibition, based on many 1970s–2000s artefacts, as well as video- and audio-installations, presents his “living” voice and his strange and whimsical image.

In his art practice, B. U. Kashkin emphasized the priority of creative process over fixed outcomes presented as material objects. His performative “playacts” (deystvo), which involved as participants members of the underground “Kartinnik” group, always targeted directly the audience’s reaction and strove to involve the viewers into an act of creation.

2018 was an anniversary year for this legendary cultural figure (he would have turned 80) and for the experimental venue that celebrates his work. These two events served as a starting point for launching a large-scale project “Buka-Marathon” organized by the B. U. Kashkin Museum and the Student Union of UrFU. The goal of this project was to expand the museum’s work and to integrate new communities, as well as to present its unique collection outside Ural Federal University. The project received support of the Presidential Grants Foundation.

Over the years, the museum personnel — both faculty members and students — have been experimenting with multiple approaches to showcase and popularize Ural unofficial art that today is actively promoted by many other art venues in the city. This indicates the importance of the museum work; the goal of the new project was to further expand the potential of B. U. Kashkin’s and his fellow artists’ works to humanize urban environment.

“Buka-Marathon” included a series of exhibitions that took place both in Ural Federal University and in partner venues in Ekaterinburg and other locations. Among the marathon events were the premiere of the dance performance “Symphony” devoted to the life and art of Yevgeny Malakhin and a student research symposium. One of the exhibitions, “Ten Days in the Life of B. U. Kashkin Museum”, celebrated the ten-year anniversary of this venue and told about the most memorable episodes from its past. All project events, some of them forming a part of the Night of the Museums program in UrFU and other venues, were made possible thanks to the active participation of student volunteers.