Khekhtsir Tales Project

Khekhtsir Tales Project

"Khekhtsir tales" is an exhibition-travel on the book of the same name by Khabarovsk artist and writer Alexander Petrovich Lepetukhin. It is based on the author's illustrations. In 2018, the project "Khekhtsir tales" became a grant winner of the M. Prokhorov Charitable Foundation. A team of museum workers and volunteers worked on it for a year.

In the book the author in simple and witty language describes the life of the inhabitants of the Khekhtsir Nature Reserve - hare, wild boar, fox, wolf and others. Together with the characters, readers learned about friendship, love, justice and kindness, as well as about man's attitude to wildlife. The role of the narrator was the main character of all the tales - Petrovich Hare, whose image Lepetukhin largely copied from himself. He introduced children to the magical world, taught them to see the wonderful in the ordinary.

The authors of the exhibition conceived not only to lead visitors through the magical world of Alexander Petrovich Lepetukhin and to acquaint them with its inhabitants, but also to tell them how and by whom fairy tales are created. The architecture of the halls of the Museum of Archaeology, which allows to divide the exhibition space into several independent parts, has greatly contributed to the realization of the idea. The author's illustrations were presented both as a classic museum exhibit and as "scenery", recreating the fairy tale world. These are familiar and familiar city streets, gardens and forest edges, flower meadows, Khekhtsir hills, banks of Amur and Ussuri, but at the same time it is a whole unexplored universe. The journey through it ended in the reconstructed workshop of A.P. Lepetukhin, where everyone could feel himself an artist.

"Going through" the pages of the book helped guide, which not only determined the storyline journey, but also contained various tasks.

The cultural and educational program included excursions, master classes, and storytelling. For example, the mini-course "Graphics Workshop" was a series of theoretical and practical classes devoted to expressive means of graphics, its types and techniques, as well as graphic tools of the artist.