A step-by-step guide to the six days it took to create the world
10 February 2025 ~ Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition
Holiness, theological doctrines and a biblical view of the world, these are some of the many spiritual components of our mortal existence with which, I imagine, I am rarely associated. I can think of hardly anybody among those few who think they know me, and that includes myself, who would even half believe that I would take an active interest in the genesis creation narrative. And yet, there I was ~ where, I shall tell you in good time ~ not merely taking an interest in, but following in the footsteps of, the Divine Creator’s plan.
This genesis paradigm has been used to explain why we go to, or in England used to go to, church on Sundays and why on that same day, before the evil ones changed the licensing laws, the pubs worked fewer hours, so that we, the people who used the pubs, would stay at home and rest in order to work greater hours in the restless week to come. Is nothing sacred to exploitation? The answer to that is no.
I had not been asked such searching biblical questions since I was a nipper, and, as far as I can recall, had never been asked them whilst standing in front of a giant globe of the world, lit up and suspended within a hushed and semi-darkened room, bathed in a red-filtered light, with a Lutheran priest standing before me dressed in a pair of jeans surrounded by a semi-circle of orange-painted rocking horses.
Something for the weekend, Sir?
Victor Ryabinin Art Exhibition retrospective 2021
Where Art Meets Interior Design
Telegraph Art Restaurant, Svetlogorsk
If this was not enough to persuade me that I had wandered onto the TV film set of the cult 1960s’ series The Prisoner, then the presence of a dinosaur’s skeleton poised at the side of the globe primordially grinning extinction at me brought me back to earth with a surrealistic jolt.
In telling you that the cavernous, scarred, hollowed out, red-brick room in which myself, my wife, the priest, the globe and the dinosaur were congregated was one piece in the mammoth jigsaw of Königsberg’s Pomart Brewery, a rambling late-19th century pile undergoing restoration and emerging from its ruined condition as a multifarious public space, those who think they know me, and this includes myself, will pick up on the one word ‘brewery’ and whisper slyly under their breath, ‘Hmm, so that’s why he was there!” But both of us could not be more wrong. Though it shames me to admit it, I was not strictly or exclusively at Pomart’s for the beer.
Not that I have not been aware of the Pomart Brewery’s existence; could I of all people be guilty of this oversight? I have known it as a historic landmark fallen into dereliction and, in more recent months, as an ambitious restoration project, complete with functioning brewery. The fact, therefore, that I have not had time to explore it in either its faded former or current glory testifies to the many things that there are to see and do in and around Kaliningrad. But here we were, or rather there we were, at last, attending an exhibition called Creation, a deceptively simple title for something of such conceptual and spatial magnitude.
Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition
The art group ‘Grain’, Creation’s creators, originates from ‘Annenkirche’ (in Russian: Анненкирхе), or the easier to relate to St Anne’s Lutheran Church in the Russian city of St Petersburg.
The group describes their exhibition as a “biblical view of the creation of the world through the prism of modern art … where the past and the present, faith and creativity, deep meaning and stunning visual design are harmoniously combined.
“At the exhibition, you will learn all the most important things about the days of the creation,” Creation’s creators promise. “You will be able to touch God, get closer to the heavenly bodies and decide for yourself whether or not to bite the forbidden fruit.”
Tempted? I wouldn’t recommend it. Although among the exhibition’s stimulating props and large-scale installations, you will find no shortage of apples, like everything else in this tour de force the apples are only as real as symbolic licence permits them to be. The creators of Creation invite you to leave this material world and sink your teeth into something that you may have bitten into before, but which lies beyond the secular yonder to which you have grown accustomed.
Ponart’s Brewery was not created as a venue for Creation, it was created for the creation of Pilsner lager (there’s no accounting for taste), but as an exact fit for Creation’s needs, it is difficult to imagine anywhere else coming reasonably close. Ponart swallows everything whole ~ you, me, apples and all, even the giant globe of the world and the looming sphere of the moon. To the exhibition’s props, the gargantuan scarred-brick labyrinth constitutes a compatible universe, an expanse in which each exhibit finds its own unique space, providing the parabolic journey, along whose line the exhibits lead you, with a transport of celestial commentary and a glimpse into your own beliefs, which, latent within your spiritual landscape, are as revealing in their intimacy as they are in cosmic proportion.
Each exhibit seems to signpost biblical images in your childhood past, which, as you are gradually reacquainted, shuffle to and fro against an ever-changing, dream-like scenery, part comprised of book illustrations, part the work of your own young hand. You can almost feel the wax of the crayons brushing against your fingers and feel the smile on your face at the Rembrandt you have created.
Creation is the kind of exhibition, the startling kind, where you can live the Earth’s first six days of life at a pace that suits your ruminations, and when you feel you have reached the seventh, you can take a well-earnt rest, for example, in one of Ponart’s relaxing bars or atmospheric restaurants.
Creation has never been so creative and Ponart’s never so tempting.
Copyright © 2018-2025 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.