Exhibition "This is how you will see Egypt ..." Automatic translate

From October 30 to November 20, 2020, the Dairafest Oriental Arts Festival is taking place in St. Petersburg. The famous city venues - the Capella, the Tavrichesky Garden Orangerie, the Museum of the History of Religion - will host concerts, lectures, and discussions that will acquaint guests with the culture of the East. The organizers of the festival are the non-profit foundation "Al-Makam" in cooperation with the International Center for Islamic Studies at the Kunstkamera and the St. Petersburg Museum of Islamic Culture.

In 2021, Russia will celebrate the 135th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Russian poet, traveler and military officer Nikolai Gumilyov (April 3, 1886 - August 26, 1921) and remember the tragic day of his death, from which we have been separated for almost 100 years.

Images of Egypt can be found both in the earliest and later texts of Nikolai Gumilyov, in his poems and prose. Initially, this is a literary embodiment of the dream of a meeting with a mysterious country. The result of several trips to Egypt was the emergence of a number of poetic texts in which one can already read non-book Egypt with its landscape-architectural realities and life problems. A kind of result was Gumilyov’s poem, written in Petrograd in 1918. The exhibition "This is how you will see Egypt…" is dedicated to this poem.

The project is based on archival photographs from St. Petersburg museums, representing the Egypt that the poet could see with his own eyes. With the help of modern museum technologies based on neural networks, eMotionTales has colored and brought to life historical photographs. An important part of the exposition is augmented reality associated with one of the quatrains: "Sheikhs pray, stern and gloomy, And the Koran lies before them, Where the Persian miniatures are Like butterflies of fairy lands." This is how Gumilev saw the illuminated spread of the initial pages, which open most of the manuscripts of the Koran. The exhibition will feature a restored manuscript of the Koran, provided by the Marjani Foundation. The exhibition also includes a six-minute film, the Arabic version of which will tell the Museum’s Egyptian audience about the project.

Partners: State Museum of the History of Religion, Museum of the History of Photography (St. Petersburg), eMotionTales company, Marjani Foundation.

Financing of the project: the "Al-Makam" foundation with the support of the Committee for Culture of St. Petersburg. The exhibition was implemented as part of the Dairafets Oriental Arts Festival as part of the Russia-Egypt Cross Year of Culture and Tourism. The Dairafest festival program is available on the website dairafest.ru

Scientific and methodological guidance: International Center for Islamic Research, MAE RAS.

The author of the exhibition project: Efim Anatolyevich Revzan, scientific curator, director of the St. Petersburg Museum of Islamic Culture, editor-in-chief of the international scientific journal Manuscripta Orientalia, head of the International Center for Islamic Studies of the MAE RAS.

The exhibition "This is how you will see Egypt…" will be held from November 10 to December 15 in the exhibition hall on the 1st floor of the State Museum of the History of Religion.