A Master Class and Press Conference in the Hermitage-Kazan Exhibition Center as part of the State Hermitage Museum and the Coca Cola Company’s joint Preserving Cultural Heritage Together program

On October 13th, 2011 in the Hermitage-Kazan Exhibition Center, a press conference was held, dedicated to the implementation of the first regional stage of the Hermitage and Coca-Cola’s joint program, entitled Preserving Cultural Heritage Together. This program included professional field work abroad for the Hermitage’s restoration specialists, who shared their new experiences in regional museums.

The winners of the contest were the artist/restorers of the Department for Scientific Restoration and Conservation, T.V. Shlykova, T.A. Sabyanina, O.M. Shuvalova, I.K. Malkiel, E.G. Shyshkova, A.O. Divletkildeeva, D.A. Smirnova. One of the winners, an artist/restorer at the Laboratory for Scientific Restoration of Works of Applied Art, Tatiana Viktorovna Shlykova, completed field work in London; a course called Glass Restoration as part of the International Academic Projects program, and became familiar with the work of the restoration laboratories of the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford.) After successfully completing her field work, in accordance with the terms of the contest, T.V. Shlykova conducted a master class in the Hermitage-Kazan Exhibition Center on October 12th 2011, dedicated to the restoration and conservation of glass and slipware for the museum specialists of the Republic of Tatarstan.

Among the timely themes addressed at the master class were questions of glass and glazed ceramic breakage, their cleaning, gluing, repair methods and the selection of restoration materials. T.V. Shlykova devoted a great deal of attention to questions surrounding the storage, exhibition and preventative conservation of archaeological and “new” glass slipware. At the conclusion of the master class, a task for restoring a specially selected artifact from the Museum Fund of the Republic of Tatarstan was drafted, for which Coca Cola provided an additional grant of 300,000 rubles. The object to be restored was a faience cup, decorated with images of masked figures from the excavations at Bilär, from the collection of the archeological museum of the Kazan-Privolzhskiy State University.

Representatives of the Kazan Kremlin Conservation Area, the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan, the State Museum of the Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan, the Bulgarian National Historical-Architectural Museum-reserve, the State Historical-Architectural Museum Ostrov-grad Sviyazhsk, the Bilär State Historical-Archaeological and Natural Museum-reserve, the Yelabuga State Historical-Architectural Museum-reserve, the Museum of Archaeology of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan named in the honor of S. Madjani, and the Archaeological Museum of Povolzhskiy Federal University.

As part of the Preserving Cultural Heritage Together program, the other restorers who won the contest, will do field work in Veliky Novgorod at Novgorod Kremlin, a Novgorod Federal Museum-reserve, in the Irkutsk Art Museum, and also in the State Public Library of Rostov-on-Don.

Tatiana Shlykova - artist/restorer of the State Hermitage Museum

Object to be restored - faience cup, decorated with images of masked figures, from Bilär (11th century)