Villa Design Group

The House of Adelaida Ivanovna

1 – 31 August 2014

Villa Design Group present The House of Adelaida Ivanovna, an exhibition of sculptural and scenographic objects providing the set for nightly performances of a new version of Gogol’s drama The Gamblers. The exhibition and performances will form the third part of a year-long project entitled The Inauguration of the Russian Season. Parts one and two will take place in London in spring 2014, with the final part returning to the capital in October. 

The Inauguration of the Russian Season is dedicated to Villa Design Group’s ongoing research into the lost texts of Russian writer Nikolai Gogol and the larger cultural and aesthetic regimes of Tsarist Russia. This line of inquiry continues the group's interest in queer histories, the relationship between objects and subjectivity, the aesthetics of cultural value and the mining of conservative political regimes for new radical potential. Throughout the project, Villa Design Group narrate the process of an architectural competition of proposals for a new library designed to house Gogol’s lost texts.

In this, the third part of the project, Villa Design Group will re-imagine Gogol’s drama and its themes of criminality, homosociality, facades, games, and neurosis as a conference of interior designers discuss the new library. The interior designers present themselves as a cabal of criminals committed to overturning the functional and rhetorical requirements of architecture, whilst trying to find a traitor in their midst; all set within Yves Saint Laurent’s faux Russian dacha, where they play cards.

Tue-Sun, 12-8pm

Event

1 – 31 August 2014
The House of Adelaida Ivanova

Thu-Sat, 7pm

Free, book your tickets by emailing [email protected].