From January 27, 2022, the Moskva Business Center will host the exhibition The Sleep of Reason as part of the International Holocaust Remembrance Week.
The organizers of the project – the Russian House in Nur-Sultan, Moskva Business Center, the Scientific and Educational Center Holocaust - will present a unique exposition to residents and guests of the capital of Kazakhstan. Its name refers to the famous etching of the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya The sleep of reason gives birth to monsters.
Olga Skalchuk, curator of the project, head of cultural programs at the Russian House: “We strive to show and explain the causes of German fascism and Nazism as an extreme manifestation of misanthropy. We want to discuss with the audience how and why a monstrous cannibalistic ideology appeared in enlightened Germany, which gave the world Goethe, Schiller and Beethoven. This dictates our appeal to the events that took place in May 1933 in the very center of Berlin. There, right next to the world-famous Humboldt University, bonfires of books were lit at night. The works of Erich-Maria Remarque, Maxim Gorky, Ernest Hemingway were thrown into the fire by students, professors, housewives who had already plunged into the “sleep of the reason. They did not understand that they were destroying more than just books. They were killing humanism – the basic genetic code of humanity.
It will only take a few years and this barbaric ignorance will give rise to ghettos and concentration camps, plunge the world into the most terrible and bloody war in history.
“The main task of our project is to resist the falsification of history, to form among young people strong immunity to radicalism, extremist and neo–Nazi theories”, - said Sergey Kozin, director of the Moskva Business Center.
The exhibition The Sleep of Reason consists of two sections: Prologue and Epilogue.
The exposition is based on books destroyed by the Nazis, and unique documents and photographs testifying to the tragic consequences of the Sleep of Reason.
The exhibition also presents works and installations by contemporary artists reflecting their views on the dramatic events of our common history and warning of the danger of their repetition.