Julianna Kulugur and Dmitry Koldarev, two artists from Nizhny Novgorod, have launched a new collaborative project, “Street Postcard,” aimed at bringing the city’s history to life through visual art. More than sixteen of their collages — built from old photographs, paint, pine cones, and seashells, each framed in the duo’s signature gold frame — now grace the buildings whose stories they set out to tell, with historical figures at the heart of each piece.
This past July, the artists installed a postcard portrait of Andrei Sakharov on the tower block where he spent nearly seven years in internal exile, cut off from all but a narrow circle: his wife, children, granddaughter, and a handful of colleagues from FIAN in Moscow. His former apartment there is now home to the Andrei Sakharov Museum. Museum director Elena Yerysheva welcomed the new installation beside the museum’s entrance, reflecting on the deep resonance of street art in an urban setting like this one. And indeed, in Nizhny Novgorod’s Prioksky District — a landscape of largely indistinguishable Soviet-era apartment blocks — a project that sparks a bit of art into daily life, illuminating the city’s own history along the way, feels like a genuinely wonderful thing.