MOSCOW.- The polytechnic Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the state literature Museum present 200 Keystrokes per Minute — an exhibition entirely devoted to the typewriter as an object and the main 20th-century tool for creating a literary text.

200 Keystrokes per Minute is a multimedia project based on a research that looked into the role of the typewriter in russian literature and in the russian history of the 20th century in general. Anna narinskaya’s project brings the results of this research together with contemporary art, offering the viewer an opportunity to see the typewriter as it was seen by its contemporaries and such as it appears to contemporary artists. Archival materials are reinserted into our time, allowing the typewriter to interact with the viewer as much as the viewer interacts with the typewriter.

The exhibition features typewriters from the collection of polytechnic museum, typewritten manuscripts from the state literature Museum, and artworks from the collection of Moscow Museum of Modern Art. visitors will be able to see works from over 20 museums and private collections, including typewriters that once belonged to lev tolstoy, boris pasternak, Aleksandr solzhenitsyn and other famous russian writers. these will be complemented by video and audio installations made specifically for the show by boris Khlebnikov, haim sokol, Alexei Aigi among others.

Next to them are the exhibits provided by Memorial international society — the evidence of the soviet state's systematic persecution of independent artists. these samizdat artefacts include a typewritten manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a page of poetry from Sintaksis [syntax] magazine with a note saying it was obtained during a house-check, Anna Akhmatova's Requiem typed by natalya gorbanevskaya, and typewriters that once belonged to nadezhda Mandelstam and feliks svetov who was arrested in the early years of perestroika.

The exhibition consists of several parts, each offering a particular perspective on the typewriter: an object of design, a tool for writers, a literary character, an art object or an object that contemporary artists study in their work. typewritten manuscripts are discussed as a simple medium, a cult phenomenon, an object of persecution or artworks. thus presented to the viewer will be all the main aspects of story of the typewriter in the 20th century russia — interconnected with the stories of writers, political history and the history of contemporary art.

MMOMA’s special project One Within the Other, which will accompany this show, continues the story started in 200 Keystrokes per Minute with a meditation on technology in art and takes the viewer back into the modern world wired by digital media. the shows will be accompanied by a common extensive education program, which will include lectures and round tables, and a catalogue.

The exhibition 200 Keystrokes per Minute continues a series of special projects by MMoMA and samsung. visitors will be able to create a unique emotional map, based on their impressions about the exhibition through the application The Art of Feeling.