Museum of Uncounted Voices

In the organizer's words:

A changeable museum space opens up insights into the fragile history of the USSR. Between seemingly objective historiography and personal ruptures, a course is created that illuminates the conflicts and time bombs of past border demarcations - highly topical and haunting.

On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded in Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre. 100 years later, the critic, curator and theater maker Marina Davydova conceives the "Museum of Uncounted Voices". In her work from 2023, Davydova shows how the borders of the nation states within the USSR came about, why these borders are now turning out to be time bombs and the extent to which the cultures of the countries that once formed the Soviet Union have always differed. The audience enters a space constructed as a museum, which is played out before their eyes, transforming and offering a course through complex contexts and references. The path leads from a seemingly objective historiography to the contradictory, to the existentially biographical.
The HAU commission was premiered in 2023 as part of the Vienna Festival and was last seen at HAU2 in October of the same year. Marina Davydova's celebrated theater work is now being revived and has lost none of its topicality. As a public opponent of Russia's war against Ukraine, the theater maker still lives in exile in Berlin.

The world premiere of "Museum of Uncounted Voices" was part of the "Voices" festival in 2023. Now "Voices Berlin Festival" 2025 will also take place at HAU from 24.10. to 16.11.

Press reviews:
"Marina Davydova's theatrical installation 'Museum of Uncounted Voices', which premiered as part of the Vienna Festival, takes up highly political subjects, weaves them into a grand lesson in history - and soon becomes entangled in the most beautiful contradictions: history does not purr away here as a continuum, but is constantly being reconstructed and deconstructed."
Petra Paterno on nachtkritik.de