Dmitry Bulin

Between realms

DMITRY BULIN

Between Realms

Curators: Anna Zaitseva, Maria Lavrova

As part of the biennale Fashion and Style in Photography – 2025, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition by contemporary photographer Dmitry Bulin. In his new project ‘Between Realms’ (2025), created specifically for the MAMM exhibition, Dmitry Bulin turns to Russian folklore and ritual motifs. Today the Russian folk tale is the leading trend of modern Russian culture. It serves as an inexhaustible resource for artists, producers, directors and fashion designers. The increased demand for folk tales makes them more than merely an object of study and interpretation; they are also frequently simplified as entertainment. Being a sensitive and subtle artist, Bulin is distinguished by his thoughtful, careful approach to the material, his understanding of its multi-layered character and depth.

In studying Russian folk tales, epics, legends and other genres of folklore, Bulin plastically rethinks their cross-cutting themes and images. In particular he focuses on the key fairy tale motifs of duality, dual worlds, transcendental transition and metamorphosis. Bulin’s heroes journey between two worlds: the earthly and otherworldly, aquatic and underwater, accompanied by the birds Sirin or Alkonost, and other mythical creatures. 

While working on the project the photographer referred to the research of famous philologist and folklorist Vladimir Propp. In his programmatic work ‘Morphology of the Folk Tale’ (1928) Propp studied how a fairy tale is structured. He analysed one hundred works from the most complete collection, ‘Russian Folk Tales’, compiled by the ethnographer and folklore collector Alexander Afanasyev, and found that they all have a universal narrative structure. Hence the folk-tale character has seven main roles (the hero, villain, donor, helper, dispatcher, princess (or her father) and false hero) and 31 functions (prohibition – violation, persecution – salvation, etc.). Propp’s findings are still used by writers, screenwriters and video game developers all over the world.

Bulin used as an aesthetic reference the 19th-century ethnographic photographs with images of the costumes and everyday life of various nationalities taken during scientific expeditions to provinces of the Russian Empire, as well as the works of outstanding photographers Andrey Denyer, William Carrick and Maxim Dmitriev, who documented scenes from folk life and ethnic types. For the photo sessions Bulin used authentic items of Russian costume and peasant life from the collections of Andrei Borovsky, Lyubov Alipova and Philipp Mayakov, as well as reconstructions by modern designers – jewellery and kokoshnik headdresses recreated from portrait paintings and original photographs.

Dmitry Bulin’s works are not illustrations of specific folk tales, but a visual study of their symbolic language, of archetypal images and features of the national cultural code and identity. The project also includes video art created with the help of artificial intelligence and based on Russian folk tales.