The Last Look. Kommunarka
Exhibition Design
GULAG History Museum, Moscow
258 m2
07.12.2021–31.05.2022
The exhibition in the new street pavilion of the Gulag History Museum presents 500 portraits of people executed during the Great Terror and buried on the territory of the former special facility of the NKVD, the Kommunarka execution range.
These are people of different nationalities, professions and social origins, among them both famous cultural figures and leading party workers, as well as ordinary workers and students - they were all shot by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and were subsequently rehabilitated.
Images from almost a century ago were reconstructed using neural network technologies and thanks to the increased quality, the images look very realistic. These are the last photographs of people taken before the execution. Every facial expression contains a unique, complex emotion, a message waiting to be looked at and understood.
The exhibition will also present the results of the research work of the Gulag History Museum and the Memory Fund at Kommunarka. Over the past two years, we have discovered and map all the execution pits at the training ground and determine an approximate chronology their appearance. Based on these data and materials from executions, in the future it will be possible to establish the names of people buried in a specific area.
Curator: Anna Red’kina
Lighting design: Vlad Oblasov
Photographer: Grigoriy Antipov