Photo Exhibition

Hi, my name is Andrey Kezzyn and I invite you to the photo exhibition ‘No Man’s Room’ from July 19 to 21 in Berlin, at Zionskirche. Fr-Sa 14:00-18:00 Su 12:00-18:00

No Man’s Room
We were living in an industrial area of the city of Leningrad. Three full-fledged families huddled together in a 50-square-meter apartment. Grandparents and their two screw-up daughters. And each brought a man into the house. Their eldest daughter, that is, my mother, distinguished herself most. By my first birthday, three surnames had changed in my documents. Mr. Alexandrov was my
biological father. According to my mother, he was ‘’a gypsy’’. My grandmother said that he was an Assyrian though. And I – well I never found out the truth. A certain Mr. Chumakov… My mother
later said that he was the love of her life. And in honour of that love story I was named Andrey. And Kezin, a man with a passion towards two things – trucks and vodka. My strange surname I received from this man. My grandmother’s youngest daughter, my aunt, gave birth a little later than her sister did. And pretty soon she left with her family to seek happiness far from her parents’ nest. Their old room became mine and I spent my entire childhood and youth in it. It was not a happy time. Kezin drank like a fish. My mother drank with him. My grandparents somehow survived in the midst of this bedlam, trying to raise me, and I hid in that room from all life’s problems. Decades have passed. On my last visit to my parents’ house, which was about 12 years ago, I found this man, my stepfather, standing in the middle of what used to be my old room. In general, not much has changed there: my mother removed the posters from the walls and re-pasted the wallpaper, but the furniture remained the same. Kezin stood in the dark against the wall and looked out the window overlooking the wall of the neighboring house; he was drunk. Without turning to me, he said in his hoarse and smoky voice: “I drink, I’m happy and I’ll kick the bucket happy.” By an absurd coincidence, these were his last words. That same night he died.

Now, having found myself in exile, having survived Covid, isolation, queues in Auslaenderbehoerde, standing on the threshold of the World War III, under the pressure of all bureaucratic, financial and family problems, I increasingly see the mise-en-scène: three walls with brownish-red wallpaper. Window with a view to nowhere. Two men, one of whom will die tonight. What awaits the second one is generally known: he will either make every effort to escape and run away as far as possible. Or he will remain standing in the centre of the composition, in the reflections of the light breaking through the only window, but this does not seem to matter. In some universe, everyone will get a chance. In some universe, everyone will make the right decision at least once. And in some universe the walls will embrace a no man’s room.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1572596073471127/