Sixty years ago Marshall McLuhan said: Medium is the message. In case of Nikolay Kulebyakin, an enthusiastic researcher of art boundaries of photography, this is absolutely true. The Iron Theatre project the author runs for already twenty five years demonstrates, first of all, photography, to the audience. To be more exact, these are twenty photos.

Just imagine, twenty times the light radiated by a certain world landscape or its fragment was captured by means of the lens of the heavy large-format camera, then it was projected to the photo paper plane by means of the photographic enlarger, after that it was developed, fixed, dried, then dressed in passepartout, put info frame and hung on the museum wall. I am so detailed about the process of creating these photos or their origin to make you understand – there is nothing accidental in them. This is the theatre in front of you — mise-en-scenes built differently in terms of composition, optics, light and colour, through which the author delivers what iron is, tells of its physical, plastic, material and metaphysic properties. This is a portrait gallery of the material that, a while ago, became the basis of the industrial civilization and — at the same time — a story-telling about it for newcomers that has never known about iron or the role it plays in our life, life of people. One could say that this is the project of the role iron plays. It would be more correct to talk about the “roles”. Indeed, anticipating philosophic discovery of the object-oriented ontology Nikolay Kulebyakin shows in his works, if put by words of Graham Harman, that “reality is always more than we know or can tell about it”. That is why, elementary situations and simple things acquire absolutely cosmic meaning in the context of his creativity.

Egor Larichev, curator

Nikolay Alekseevich Kulebyakin – a Russian photographer.

He was born in 1959 in Fryazino town of the Moscow Region.

He graduated Mossovet Polytechnic School (Moscow) in 1981.

He has been participating in exhibitions since 1979. 

Since 1988, he has been participant to many exhibitions abroad.

Magnezit Museum.

Satka, Solnechnaya str., 34

8 (351 61) 9 46 84, museum@magnezit.com

The museum is open: 

9:00 -17:00 

lunch break 12:00-13:00 Saturday / Sunday 10:00-16:00