Roman
Tverdokhlebov
interdisciplinary artist · ceramics · mosaic · sculpture · installation
interdisciplinary artist · ceramics · mosaic · sculpture · installation
Roman Tverdokhlebov (b. 1987) is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist working in ceramics, sculpture, mosaic and installation. His practice unfolds as a long-term project — Museum of Post-Apocalyptic Archaeology — combining artistic research with an archaeological approach to the material culture of the present.
In 2022 he presented his first solo show, Museum of Post-Apocalyptic Archeology, at Cube Moscow, which became the founding event of the project. Participant of the 2nd Chuvash Contemporary Art Biennial; group exhibitions Return Home (IRRA) and Fixing Meaning (Gorky Park Museum × Cube Moscow).
Resident of the Moscow Workshops programme (2nd season) by the Agency of Creative Industries. Worked as part of authorial teams on major monumental commissions — the dome painting at Lefortovo metro station and the restoration of bas-reliefs at the Volga Region Pavilion, VDNH.
His works are held in private collections, as well as in the holdings of the Andrei Voznesensky Museum and Cultural Centre and the Agency of Creative Industries.
My artistic practice is built as a long-term investigation that operates by the logic of a fictional museum and archive. I treat the present as a material that produces traces and fragments which, over time, pass into the status of cultural evidence.
In my work I use mosaic, ceramics, sculpture and architectural forms as instruments of temporal distance. The material sets the mode of perception, allowing the loss of function, the shift of context and the ambiguity of interpretation to be fixed as artistic conditions. Archaeology here acts not as a theme but as a way of thinking.
The Museum of Post-Apocalyptic Archaeology is an open project built on the logic of a museum. The institutional part functions as a collection and archive of objects; the landscape part — as a space of conditional field finds.
The museum studies the present as material for long-term preservation. Mosaic, ceramics, sculpture and architectural forms are tools of temporal distance. Each work registers the loss of function, the shift of context, and the ambiguity of interpretation.
The project unfolds as a modular system, adaptable to any exhibition context — from a museum hall to open landscape.
Archival photographs from past exhibitions, curatorial projects and institutional venues.
The collection is organised by the typology of material evidence. Each section is a separate research line of the project.
Sculptural objects whose titles have been replaced by numeric codes. The name becomes an inventory number; the form, a testimony to lost function.
A palaeontological archive of what never was. The series records vanished species through their remains — strange skulls, bones, skeletons of organisms that never existed. For now the collection holds only skulls.
Small ceramic reliefs — provisional coins of non-existent states. Numeric codes replace the denomination.
A mosaic series in which images of mass and digital culture are treated as elements of the cultural stratum. Mosaic, set against the velocity of digital imagery.
The experience of a generation raised at the junction of Soviet «reality» and emerging digital culture. Utilitarian building material as carrier of new meaning.
A fragment of an architectural intervention: graffiti caryatids integrated into the structure of a ruined building, functioning as remnants of a lost architectural canon.
The project's site is the exhibit itself: a working service terminal of the museum's 2326 archive, laid out in the language of the MS-DOS text interface. The portfolio you're reading is built in that same language.
Inside — the collection catalogue by funds, inventory cards of storage units, field documentation, the geoscope of Earth-2326, a spectral laboratory and a reference service.
The terminal sections and field location-reconstructions are gathered on a separate page; full versions open in the live archive terminal at mopaa.foundation.
ENTER THE TERMINAL · MOPAA.FOUNDATION →