The public educational program combines theoretical reflection, collective practices, and performative readings to reveal the main paradox of the exhibition: how art interacts with literary myths while remaining their hostage. Through lectures, a reading group, art mediations, and curatorial tours, participants will explore the disintegration of language, the power of clichés, and the birth of new forms on the ruins of old narratives. The program won't provide answers but will raise questions together with the viewer: if everything around us is text, then who is the author? And is it possible to break free from the script when even rebellion becomes a quotation?
One of the program's culminating points will be a performative reading of Alexander Tsikarishvili's play "A Cataract of Prejudice" performed by Pyotr Skvortsov (actor at the Praktika Theater, Inside Theater, Meyerhold Center, musician) with sound accompaniment (Alexander Tsikarishvili).
Pyotr Skvortsov Reads the Play “A Cataract of Prejudice”
Date: May 23, 7:00 PM
Imagine Leningrad, where cracks in the asphalt lead to parallel worlds, and factory horns blend with the blues riffs of Robert Johnson, who sold his soul for a guitar solo. This is the world of Gena — a young dreamer in a Gautier jacket, whose life crumbles like an old portrait of Lenin in the Petrogradskaya metro station. After a quarrel with Natasha, he flees through the labyrinthine city: past the drunks by the poplars and the "electric spiders" of streetlights — until he finds himself in the canteen of the "Danger Signal" factory. Here, among sticky oilcloths and the fumes of papirosy, a meeting awaits him with Meph. Meph, balancing between the roles of devil and jester, offers Gena a deal. Absurdity here is the language spoken by walls layered with time, a stray poodle asking a mute question, and even a glass of water turning into Georgian chacha.
The play by Alexander Tsikarishvili will be read by actor and musician Pyotr Skvortsov (actor at the Praktika Theater, Inside Theater, Meyerhold Center, known for his leading role in the film The Student) accompanied by sound (Alexander Tsikarishvili).
Choral Exercise for Four Actresses: “Hamletmachine: Assembly Instructions”
Dates: June 6 and June 20, 7:00 PM
Four actresses interact as parts of a single mechanism, exploring the fragmentary nature of Heiner Müller's text. The text becomes an "instruction" that first unites, then destroys their interaction. The exercise focuses on voice, movement, and collective plasticity, revealing the conflict between personal identity and collective machine dynamics.
Heiner Müller's play Hamletmachine fits perfectly into the context of an exhibition analyzing the decomposition of language, identity, and time. The works of Edward Kienholz, which inspired the exhibition, reflect fragmentation and dehumanization, where the body becomes an object of violence and social critique. Just as Kienholz used found objects to create artistic commentary, Müller's text becomes a "found instruction" for the deconstruction of a classical narrative. The choral exercise invites viewers not only to observe the process of "assembling" the text but also to experience it as an act of interaction with history, body, and time.
Serafima Tomoshevskaya is a theater and film director, screenwriter, and researcher of stage movement, nominee and laureate of theater festivals. She has experience collaborating with leading museums and cultural institutions. Her works explore cultural-communication systems, biomechanics, and plasticity.
Actresses: Sasha Rangult, Veronika Dzova, Marina Galamdinova, Irina Sherstennikova
Film Lectures by Authors of the K! Samizdat and the Telegram Channel "cinematic chick chirik" with Discussion
The film lecture format includes a half-hour introduction to the film's context, a screening, and a live discussion where participants can explore how films become mirrors of disintegrating narratives. From Gennady Shpalikov to Yuri Mamin — directors turn the screen into a testing ground for deconstructing myths: utopias get stuck in the loops of history, the language of posters merges with absurdity, and the past breaks through into the present like a needle through film. Lecturers from the K! samizdat will show how static shots and anachronisms turn the viewer into a participant in an eternal "now," where the future is a collage of fragments from different eras. Each lecture is a dialogue between cinema and the exhibition. Come if you're ready to laugh at the rage of history and seek meaning in the shards of chronotopes.
Film Lecture by Natasha Prudnikova on Gennady Shpalikov's Film “A Long Happy Life”
Date: May 16, 7:00 PM
A Long Happy Life (1966) by Gennady Shpalikov is a cinematic poem about how time shatters myths into fragments. The encounter between two chance fellow travelers — the romantic Lena and the cynical geologist Viktor — becomes an allegory of an era: the Sixties generation, who dreamed of a "bright path," confront the absurdity of unfulfilled promises. Static shots, dialogues of half-spoken words, and the final barge floating into emptiness create a chronotope of frozen present. Here, Chekhovian motifs intertwine with the theater of the absurd, and hope for a "long life" crumbles like snow under bus wheels.
Shpalikov's film reads today as a prefiguration of contemporary art: its visual asceticism, ruptures in narrative, and play with the mythologies of the Thaw bring cinema closer to installation. Each frame is an object in a museum of the unfulfilled, where the viewer becomes a participant in disintegration, and time acts as a curator, placing marks on the shelf of lost utopias.
Lecturer: Natasha Prudnikova — art historian, film critic, author and editorial member of the K! samizdat about cinema.
Film Lecture by Polina Trubitsyna on the Film “Outskirts” by Pyotr Lutsik and Alexander Samoryadov
Date: May 29, 7:00 PM
Outskirts (1998) by Pyotr Lutsik and Alexander Samoryadov is a cinematic requiem for a time that didn't pass but got stuck in a loop of myths. The film begins as a farce: Ural peasants, dressed in work jackets from the Civil War era, head to Moscow to demand land — as if the history of the USSR took a wrong turn, and the viewer has landed in a parallel reality where the 1990s merged with the 1930s. Lutsik and Samoryadov don't recreate an era; they explode it, turning the narrative into a collage of anachronisms: vouchers coexist with slogans about collectivization, and characters speak the language of posters, as if quoting a long-decayed script of revolution. This isn't nostalgia — it's an autopsy of collective trauma, where time becomes material for montage, and myths become weapons against themselves.
The peasant uprising here takes on the features of a ritual: their journey to the capital is a performance where every gesture is hyperbolized, as in an agitprop play where, after the act of destroying Moscow, the heroes return to the outskirts to plow the land again with tractors sufficient only for three. This endless cycle is not a metaphor but a diagnosis: the future does not arrive; it gets stuck in the gesture of repetition, like a needle on a broken record. The viewer doesn't just observe history but becomes a participant in its deconstruction, where every rupture in chronology exposes the mechanisms of myth-making. Lutsik doesn't explain but shows how the past breaks into the present, turning reality into a theater of the absurd where the only way out is laughter through rage.
Lecturer: Polina Trubitsyna — researcher of cinema and audiovisual art, author for the K! samizdat about cinema, lecturer at St. Petersburg State University.
Film Lecture by Sveta Lang on Chantal Akerman's Film “From the East”
Date: June 12, 7:00 PM
In From the East, Chantal Akerman turns cinema into an archaeology of time. Her camera, like a seismograph, records not so much events as their echo within the linear fabric of history. The post-Soviet space here is not a backdrop but the main character: train stations, empty apartments, snow-covered roads become casts of an era where time does not flow but fragments. Long static shots, minimal dialogue, and deliberate slowness create an effect of temporal vacuum — the viewer finds themselves trapped between a past that won't let go and a future that never arrives. This isn't documentary but a meditation on the disintegration of chronos, where each frame is a shard of fragile memory.
Akerman refuses narrative to give voice to time itself: it knocks in train wheels, freezes in the eyes of those left waiting behind closed doors. Soviet utopia here is a ghost, and the 1990s are not a transition but a chasm. The film becomes a map of temporal fractures where geographical movement "from the east" transforms into a metaphor for migration through eras.
Lecturer: Sveta Lang — author for ORNAMENT and the K! samizdat, lecturer, curator of film programs.
Film Lecture by Ulya Martyanova on Yuri Mamin's Film “Sideburns”
The 1990 film, shot at the twilight of the USSR, is not just a black comedy but a laboratory where myths are melted into ideological weapons. Mamin constructs a world where time is warped: Civil War costumes coexist with 1990s vouchers, and lines from Eugene Onegin sound like slogans in street clashes. This isn't anachronism but a method — the director shows how past and future collide at a point of eternal present, where any utopia is destined to become a tool of control.
The film's visual language is a collage of references: from agitprop poster aesthetics to quotes from A Clockwork Orange. The performances of the "Pushkinists," marching with canes, resemble either a theater of the absurd or a ritual where every gesture is hyperbolized to the point of grotesque. Mamin doesn't judge his heroes — he exposes the mechanisms of myth-making, demonstrating how even Pushkin, a symbol of freedom, can become a banner for those who crave order at any cost. The director shows how nationalist movements would use culture as a cover. His work is a mirror reflecting not only the crisis of the 1990s but also the eternal temptation to substitute freedom with discipline, and poetry with propaganda.
Lecturer: Ulya Martyanova — researcher of cinema and theater, screenwriter, co-host of the podcast "how we ran from cinema and music," Telegram channel "cinematic chick chirik".
Reading Group: “The Disintegration of Language and Myths of Visuality”
The reading group will be a space for deep immersion into the exhibition's themes. It will allow participants not only to better understand the presented works but also to see them in the context of philosophical and artistic productions. Within the series of discussions, texts will become keys to decoding art objects: participants will explore how art struggles with literary myths about itself, and language disintegrates into shards of meaning. Through analysis of artistic and theoretical materials, the group will deconstruct established narratives to discover new forms of expression — on the edge of irony and reflection, where words lose power, turning into elements of visual topography. Each of the texts examined, in its unique way, challenges traditional narratives, forcing a reconsideration of the role of language, art, and power in constructing reality.
Reading on Susan Sontag's Text “Regarding the Pain of Others”
Date: May 22, 7:00 PM
The essay focuses on the ethics of visual representation of pain and the role of photography in shaping collective memory. Sontag analyzes how images of wars and violence turn into commodities that exploit sympathy or induce emotional numbness. She raises the question of the limits of aestheticizing suffering: can a "beautiful" photograph of a catastrophe be ethical, or does it reduce tragedy to spectacle? The book also explores the politics of the gaze, exposing how media and power manipulate images to justify violence or create false narratives. Sontag calls for responsibility not only from photographers but also from viewers, whose silent consumption of images makes them complicit in the system.
Facilitator: Anna Tyrenko — philologist, performance researcher, head of the literary club and the "Art of Action" section at the Youth Center of the State Hermitage Museum.
Reading on the Script “Morning of the 21st Century” by Pyotr Lutsik and Alexey Samoryadov / + Fairy Tales
The work of the duo is a manifesto of late-Soviet absurdity, where history and language undergo radical deconstruction. It is written about the scripts of Pyotr Lutsik and Alexey Samoryadov that they seem to form an alternative reality, as if once finding oneself in the past, there was a chance to change its parameters in order to end up in a new today. The script "Morning of the 21st Century" we would like to examine in terms of those settings, parameters, codes that today we literally absorb. In it, both the fairy-tale narrative and the features of the image not of a woman but of the feminine are demonstratively woven together, the crowd of the hero — a motorcycle trail, when at first it seems he moves without a goal, riding to exhaust himself and get tired, because there is too much strength in him for that century when the text was written.
For the reading, it is also suggested to familiarize oneself with at least one of the fairy tales by P. Lutsik and A. Samoryadov ("A Fairy Tale About What We Can and Cannot Do", "A Fairy Tale on the Sand", "A Fairy Tale About the Last Angel").
Facilitator: Alina Shklyarskaya — playwright, art historian, author of texts for contemporary performative productions, curator of theater festivals and projects in the field of art and theater, laureate of the Golden Mask Award.
Reading on Thomas Pynchon's Novel “The Crying of Lot 49”
The book explores the theme of paranoia and the disintegration of reality through the lens of a postmodern detective story. Pynchon creates a world where random symbols and words become keys to secret systems — from medieval conspiracies to modern corporate networks, undermining the very idea of objective truth. The central theme is the entropy of meaning: language and communication turn into a labyrinth where signs lose connection with reality, and the search for order leads to immersion in chaos. The novel also critiques literary myths, showing how narratives become instruments of control, and art a hostage of its own constructions. Through allusions to pop culture, science, and history, Pynchon reveals the absurdity of humanity's attempts to systematize the world.
Facilitator: Anna Tyrenko — philologist, performance researcher, head of the literary club and the "Art of Action" section at the Youth Center of the State Hermitage Museum.
Lectures for the Exhibition
Lecture by Alexandra Abakshina: “The Quantum Dramaturgy of Pavel Pryazhko — Existing and Imagined Production Histories”
Date: May 30, 7:00 PM
"If I were to translate my feelings about Pavel Pryazhko's method, I would say he works on the principle of a space probe," says Alexandra Abakshina. Observation, eavesdropping, and documentation were important components in the creation of his plays. But Pryazhko as a playwright finds this insufficient and behaves like a space probe: he not only collects all possible signals for which he has interfaces. Space probes carry on board a golden record with recordings of humanity's cultural artifacts for potential encounters with extraterrestrial civilizations. Pryazhko also carries with him a kind of message, which is effectively the past. For example, 60s music in the children's play "The Chick."
Postmodernism smashed language into pieces, deconstructed it; Pryazhko goes further and conducts an experiment: can a text both exist and not exist simultaneously? His plays are like Schrödinger's cats, and this raises questions about methods of their stage interpretation. The lecture is devoted to the structure of Pryazhko's plays, existing productions, and unrealized stage potentials.
Lecturer: Alexandra Abakshina — director, artist, curator of the "Atelier Without Mirrors" gallery, co-founder of the post-anatomical theater Maailmanloppu (2016); participant in residencies at the Garage Museum (2021) and the GES-2 House of Culture (2024).
Lecture by Maximilian Neapolitansky: “The Language That Betrayed Us: How Philosophy Explains Absurdity, Disintegration, and Revolt in Culture”
What to do if the world no longer lends itself to narrative? In this lecture, we will discuss how philosophy makes sense of cultural disintegration and revolt through the ideas of Byung-Chul Han on the crisis of narrative, Deleuze on nonsense as productive meaninglessness, and Barthes on everyday life turned into myth. We will examine how contemporary culture — from memes to post-irony — rejects linear stories, chooses the fragment, the joke, the glitch, and thereby expresses what can no longer be expressed directly: the feeling of rupture, muteness, and the desire to break free from them.
Lecturer: Maximilian Neapolitansky — poet, philosophy researcher, author of the "Geophilosophy" project and the channel "scenarios-m", author of the explainer book on contemporary philosophy "What is Truth?" (MIF, 2024).
Tour of the Bad Script Exhibition by Liza Tsikarishvili, Co-founder of the Gallery
Date: June 28, 12:00 PM
We invite you to immerse yourself in the space of the ruins of language, where art confronts its own myths but remains their captive. Liza Tsikarishvili will lead viewers across the concrete, cold floor of Sobo Gallery, which has absorbed hidden scripts where shards of words transform into installations, sound landscapes, and video ghosts. You will see how the works of participants — from Tsvety Dzhondzholi to Yary Slava Nero — become acts of the theater of absurdity, pass through zones of silence and explosions of clichés. Together with the curator, you will decipher allusions to the cinema of the Sixties generation, the late-Soviet absurdity of Lutsik and Samoryadov, and the provocative universes of Ed Kienholz.
P.S. Bring your doubts with you. Certainty will remain outside the door.
Art Mediations for the Exhibition with Art Historian Anna Abramova
Date: June 14, 3:00 PM
Art mediation is a dialogue where the mediator, unlike a tour guide, does not provide ready-made answers or unambiguous interpretations. Their task is to create conditions where participants become co-authors of interpretation, uniting personal experience, emotions, and questions into a common field of meanings. There are no right or wrong views here — only a process where even doubts become tools for exploring art.
Art Mediator: Anya Abramova — art researcher, art mediator, project coordinator at the Institute for Street Art Research.
Art Brunch “The Broken Breakfast”
Date: June 21, 12:00 PM
We invite you to an informal dialogue with gallery co-founder Liza Tsikarishvili and artists from the Bad Script exhibition — over a cup of coffee and flaky croissants. Instead of lectures — conversations about how clichés stick to morning toasts, why text crumbles like crumbs on a tablecloth, and whether it's possible to assemble meanings into a recipe for a new narrative.
The brunch will be a meeting point for those hungry for art and those full of established forms. The number of places is limited by the size of the metaphorical tablecloth.
Participants:
— Liza Tsikarishvili — on how to connect different texts together and why a "bad script" is bad;
— Lev Kazak — on assembling the sets of non-existent films;
— Kolya Sadovnik — on how cypress trees grow, the wisdom of mountains, and the magic of foam concrete.
On the menu: unresolved paradoxes of the exhibition, strong espresso with a foam of questions; puff pastry with a filling of quotes from Shpalikov.
Master Class by Artist Vera Petrovskaya for Children: Creating Pop-Up Cards Based on Children's Poems by Alexander Vvedensky
Date: May 31, 12:00 PM
We invite everyone who believes that books can not only speak but also dance! In this master class, you will turn ordinary paper into a magical pop-up theater where the heroes of your future stories will jump out of the card like prompters from backstage.
What awaits you:
— Creating three-dimensional scenes from paper where your cat can become the main character;
— Cutting, gluing, and bringing words to life so they turn into dialogues for paper actors;
— You'll discover that scissors and glue can be cooler than ChatGPT;
— Learn to hide secrets in the folds of paper, just like the heroes of the Bad Script exhibition do;
— Everyone will take home their own pop-up card, which will wink from the shelf and remind you: even the most serious text can be turned into a game.
The number of places is limited, like the pages in a pop-up card.
Facilitator: Vera Petrovskaya — interdisciplinary artist from St. Petersburg, works with textiles, embroidery, assemblage, ceramics, and artist's books.
Duration: 2 hours
Materials: scissors, paper, glue, old magazines and newspapers
Age group: 7–10 years
