The St Petersburg PRO ARTE Foundation for Culture and Arts is a non-profit, non-governmental organization. The Foundation promotes contemporary arts and culture, its main fields of activity being visual art, music, architecture, art journalism, and design. We were invited as one of a few international agencies to create a temporary exhibtion in St Petersburg.
During the 3rd St. Petersburg Biennale of Museum Design we designed the "Philately as Art" exhibition.
During the 3rd St. Petersburg Biennale of Museum Design we designed the "Philately as Art" exhibition.
Our mission was to expose the collection of A.S. Popov Museum’s stamp collection, in a way that allows a wider public to engage with the material.
The project had a number of interesting challenges such as massive exposure to daylight, as well as the placement within a visually busy atrium with multiple parallel exhibits and architectural features on site that would be competing for visitor attention. Another challenge, was that the beauty and significance of the stamp collection is not immediately obvious to the wider population.
“Stamps have a big message in a small format. We were intrigued by the jumping back and forth in scale. The early sketches of concept worked around numerous versions of zooming-in and zooming-out in a transition of scales. We were also looking for an eye-catching format that would attract immediate attention, and the impetus to inspect from a closer position.
