ОНИ МНЕ СКАЗАЛИ, А Я ПОВТОРЯЮ. Альбом к выставке (издание на английском языке)

From 17 April to 31 August 2001, the tenth anniversary of the Rare Books from St Petersburg publishing house was marked in the State Hermitage by an extraordinary exhibition: “ ‘They Said to Me and I Repeat’. From the poetry of Sumer and Babylonia. Words and clay. 3rd millennium BC–3rd millennium AD” which presented the unique publication Seven Incantations, Prayers and Ritual Songs from the poetry of Sumer and Babylonia — seven clay sculptures bearing the texts of translations from the poetry of Sumer and Babylonia.

The book featured in the exhibition was one of the publishing house’s most unusual and striking experiments, for the realization of which its head Piotr Suspitsyn invited not a graphic artist, and not even a painter, but the ceramic sculptor Vladimir Tsivin, the recipient of numerous Russian and foreign prizes and awards for his work in that field.

The result of combining “the archaic and the innovative”, deep antiquity and avant-garde form, through the creative potential of three kinds of art — sculpture, ceramics and typography — was the creation of seven “clay book-sculptures” The “clay books”, “people-tablets” or “sculpture-poems”, as the artist calls them, have a prototype in Sumerian cuneiform tablets and ritual figurine offerings —adorants. Their front side is three-dimensional with the shape of the human body, while the back is flattened with letters sunken into it in counter-relief.