Hundreds of tiny carved figures and pieces of old scrap perform an incredible Heath-Robinson-meets-Hieronymous-Bosch choreography to haunting music and synchronised lighting, telling the funny and tragic stories of the struggle of the human spirit against the relentless circles of life and death.
SHARMANKA (Russian word for a barrel organ) is a collaboration between the sculptor - mechanic Eduard BERSUDSKY (b 1939) and the theatre critic and director Tatiana JAKOVSKAYA (b.1947), which began in Russia in 1988. Eduard, a self-taught visionary artist, had been making his "kinemats" in his private room since the 1970s (any public exhibition would be anyway impossible under communist regime). For Tatiana it is an ideal theatre of super-marionnettes.
SHARMANKA was launched in 1989 in St. Petersburg, moved to Scotland in 1993 and open its own gallery in Glasgow in 1996.New kinema
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