‘Motherland’ exhibition goes on show at the Moscow Museum

A new photography exhibition attempts to show Russia’s vast and varied landscape with images featuring scenes from Russian enclave Kaliningrad in the west over to the Kuril Islands in the far east. How Do You Start a Motherland? at the Moscow Museum showcases the work of 36 photographers living all over Russia who were asked to answer the question in the exhibition’s title.

The result, says Alina Saprykina, director of the Moscow Museum, is “an attempt to describe in the language of photography a great country and its different people while also capturing their similarities”.

While the exhibition depicts a variety of Russian traditions and its rural communities, Saprykina says she hopes it will encourage a rediscovery of Russia’s diversity. She said: “We hope it will provide an occasion to reflect on the happiness of some of its residents and the misfortune of others; the insane concentration of life in the capital and the slow, sometimes hopeless, life away from the centres of civilisation; about the birth of a new culture and what is left of the old.”

How do you start a Motherland? will be in Moscow until 8 June, after which it will go on a tour of major cities in Russia. As part of the project, photography master classes will be held during May.