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Medium Religion / Documentary Installations
 
lenin
Virtual Lenin Mausoleum, 1998/2008

When Stalin suggested preserving Lenin's corpse in perpetuity, Trotsky is said to have replied: "If I have understood Comrade Stalin correctly, he is suggesting we replace the relics of St. Sergius of Radonesh and St. Seraphim of Sarov with the relics of Vladimir Ilyitch." After Lenin's death on January 20, 1924, his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya tried in vain to prevent a cult forming around Lenin. The Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, at first provisionally designed out of wood and later of granite by the architect Aleksey Shchusev, became a centre for cultic pilgrimage: today the embalmed corpse of Lenin is still lying there displayed on its bier.

Maxim Kononenko, Natalia Struchkova, Alexey Naumenkov, Timur Yudin, Virtual Mawsolej W. I. Lenina, 1998/2008
3D computer model VRML/ParallelGraphics
courtesy Maxim Kononenko, Natalia Struchkova, Alexey Naumenkov, Timur Yudin

Alexei W. Schtschussew, Lenin Mausoleum, 1924/2008
5 historical photographs (digital print), each 30 x 40 cm

Geneviève Zondervan, Lenine (Portrait of Lenin), 1953
oil on canvas
27 x 22 cm
courtesy Sarah Wilson