Two site-specific installations, the first by Uliana Apatina (London, UK) and the second by the Iced Architects (Moscow, Russia).

Both installations are created by artist-architects, who use the space itself and the concept of space as both the launching pad, and the main source of inspiration for their works.

The title for Uliana Apatina’s site-specific installation is taken from the name of a book by visionary architect, writer, and educator Bernard Tschumi. The main spaces of Pushkin House are animated and transformed provoking a powerful reconsideration of the colour red. The new installation aims to challenge visitors' mental and emotional experience both of the colour red and of the house itself and its relationship to the outside world.

Originally from Siberia, Russia, Uliana Apatina has a multidisciplinary background in fine art, architecture and journalism. She was awarded a scholarship from the Architectural Association, London (2010) and the Kim Fielding Award for the experimental arts in 2015. Apatina was a resident at 2014 International Artist-in-Residence Programme in Aso, Japan and Nicholas Boas awardee for the British School in Rome Residency in 2009.

The Heavens is a site-specific installation created anew for Pushkin House by the Iced Architects (Alexei Kononenko and Ilya Voznesensky), the centrepiece of which are projected videos: animation of the iconic mosaics by Alexander Deineka from the ceiling of Mayakovksy Metro Station in Moscow (1938). The mosaics depict 24 hours in the life of the Soviet Union. The Iced Architects have animated the mosaics to depict an aeroplane flying through them.

The Iced Architects is a group of avant-garde architect-artists who have been working in Moscow since the mid 1990s. The group was formed by Ilya Bilashenko and Ilya Voznesensky in Moscow in 1993. Current members are: Alexei Kononenko, Igor Boury and Ilya Voznesensky. Their work as artists straddles art and architecture and in spirit they have inherited the mantle of the paper architects: Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin.  They had the opportunity of realising some of their wilder projects in the new market economy of the late 1990s and early 2000s in Russia; more lately they have been responding to specific sites in their concept-based work. 

Amongst their numerous recent projects and interventions are: Transgression, which was part of From the Shores of the Black Sea international exhibition at The Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi (2016); Ararat and The New Streets were exhibited at The Museum of Street Art in St Petersburg, Russia in 2015; The Hotel for the Homeless, which was a part of Modernicon exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (2010),was also nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in Moscow.