Inclusive practices in art institutions: the St. Petersburg experience

Anastasia Tikhonova: art historian and scholar, focusing on the art of St. Petersburg; graduate of the Open Arts and Sciences Department at St. Petersburg State University.

Introduction

Variety and accessibility have already cemented themselves as basic values in Western culture, and inclusive practices have become an essential field of work in institutions throughout Europe, the United States, Canada and other developed countries. The world’s leading museums and galleries try to organize their spaces to make them accessible for people with extremely varied experiences of the world. Russian art institutions are also part of the global agenda, and are making every effort to tackle these contemporary challenges. Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the V-A-C Foundation, the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Polytechnic Museum, and many other organizations—albeit primarily those based in Moscow—offer professionally developed programs that are accessible to people with a variety of experiences, supporting diversity among their staff, and actively work to promote the values of inclusion.  

If in Moscow, people with special needs “must fret over the choice between events in numerous museums,” they simply do not have the opportunity to participate in society’s cultural life in other regions. In this paper, I will focus on the art scene in St. Petersburg and determine how open the art institutions of Russia’s northern capital are for a wide variety of people. To do so, I will examine the inclusive practices adopted by the city’s leading museums and galleries: the Russian Museum, the Hermitage, the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, and others.

The concepts of “inclusion” and “accessibility”

The terms themselves should be considered before any description of practices. In the broadest sense, the word “inclusion” implies the inclusion of people with special needs into the social, cultural, and civil life of a society. As the discussion turns to art institutions, it is understood to mean engagement with individuals who previously remained beyond the periphery of their work: people with disabilities, people with experience of migration, teenagers, older people, and others. The concept of “accessibility” is also complicated, and can be defined in different ways depending on the interpreter’s approach and perspective. In any case, accessibility practices are typically divided into different levels: physical, communication, social, and others.

When speaking of “accessibility,” many people think exclusively about physical accessibility. As a result, physical spaces in art institutions are adapted for special needs (by installing ramps, handicapped restrooms, and so on), yet “the events […] conducted or an uninformed attitude among employees toward people with special needs are far removed from the principles of accessibility.” The constructed accessibility of the building is just the first step toward creating a space that could truly serve as a meeting place for the widest variety of people.  

In Russia, active interest in inclusive practices grew during the 2010s, after the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2012) and the passage of the law “On education in the Russian Federation” (2012), which included the creation of inclusive classrooms. Another important milestone was the approval of the Accessible Environment program (2011), which was based on the need to eliminate environmental barriers and make cultural sites and objects accessible to people with disabilities. This paved the way for reconfiguring public attitudes so that people with varying experiences could have equal access to a cultural, social, and civic life in the future.

Inclusive practices in St. Petersburg art institutions

An examination of the practices in Saint Petersburg institutions should begin with the State Russian Museum, which has worked with issues of accessibility for more than 30 years. The first programs for people with special needs were initiated in 1992, and in 2015 the museum created a dedicated inclusive department (the socio-cultural communication department), which specializes in engaging the widest possible spectrum of visitor categories.  

The museum has accounts on social media and a YouTube channel, significantly simplifying access to information about special opportunities. The official site is simple, comprehensible, and easy to use, with subtitles available for all videos. Convenient online resources affiliated with the museum increase accessibility, beginning with the process of planning a visit.  

Among the Russian Museum’s inclusive practices are working with deaf and hard-of-hearing tour guides, who tell visitors about exhibits in Russian Sign Language (RSL). Launched in 2020, these tours are free. For those who wish to explore exhibits independently, a mobile app called “Russian Museum in RSL,” complete with a video guide, is available. The creators of the app “strove to encompass the different forms of information perception by deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors […] and enabled the control of video playback speed and subtitle size.”³ This makes the text of the video guide accessible to both deaf and hearing users.  

Unfortunately, the app does not cover the entire permanent collection, but there will be updates and expansion over time. It should also be noted that the museum does not offer tours in RSL with translations for hearing visitors, another significant oversight. These tours could allow hearing persons to “discover the unique position of a non-hearing mediator” and grow closer to the deaf community.  

The museum actively works with non-sighted and partially sighted visitors as well. On offer are tours with a specially trained mediator or an audio guide for the blind (accessible through Izi.Travel). The creators of the guide took stories about the life and work of Russian artists and added thematic music and interesting facts about famous paintings. Thanks to this unpretentious and free-form approach, the project may also be of interest to seeing visitors as well. 

Museum employees conduct “journeys” through the Summer Garden, where non-sighted and partially sighted visitors can encounter the museum’s sculptures, latticework, and greenery. A tactile excursion through the Stroganov Palace was opened in November 2021, introducing visitors to 25 different sculptures. An exhibit of this size is not sufficient for a complete overview of the collection, but this is the first experience with organizing tactile excursions not just for the Russian Museum, but, as far as I know, for St. Petersburg cultural institutions in general. Hopefully, over time the number of tactile models on display will continue to grow.  

Of special interest is the museum’s work for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. The Russian Museum regularly conducts adapted tours and supports both artists with disabilities and volunteer organizations. In addition, the museum hosts Open Studio, an artists’ workshop where people with developmental and intellectual disabilities can engage in creative work. In September 2021, it showed an exhibition of artists in social and cultural isolation. Many of the artists were Open Studio residents who live in closed institutions.  

In September 2021, the Russian Museum organized an inclusive laboratory called Art Transformations in the Mikhailovsky Garden, where people with developmental disabilities (including patients in psychological and neurological care homes) created an artistic project about an “imaginary museum” alongside contemporary artists, curators, and volunteers. Working in teams, the participants developed the project concept and design, then gave a presentation. The main aim was to model a space where each and every participant could offer their own contribution to the team’s work.  

In summary, the Russian Museum is creating a cultural space that is open to people with a wide variety of experiences. Inclusion is not equally applied to all potential visitor groups (for instance, the museum has yet to create programs for people with experience of migration), but the sociocultural communication department’s work still offers a good example for other cultural institutions and changes the city’s cultural landscape by making it more open and approachable.  

St. Petersburg’s largest museum, the Hermitage, trails the Russian Museum in terms of inclusive practices. The importance of inclusion is recognized only at the level of discourse, but programs intended to create an inclusive environment are far from remarkable. The museum’s official site can hardly be called easy to use, and finding important information for people with special needs is fairly difficult.  

Nevertheless, the museum is trying to become more accessible. See, for instance, the exhibition Invisible Art: Expanding the Boundaries of What Is Possible, which opened in November 2021. It featured tactile copies of medieval frescoes, ancient artifacts, and even carpets from the Hermitage collection. It also included a three-meter-tall tactile copy of a Rembrandt painting, which was first shown in 2018.  

Invisible Art was primarily addressed to blind and partially sighted visitors, but was unquestionably of interest to all other categories of visitor. It offered a unique opportunity for tactile interaction with objects that previously could not be touched. Even more significantly, many of these objects are difficult to see even for people with good vision. Without background information, it is difficult to understand what is depicted on medieval frescoes or ancient carpets that have faded over time. In this way, Invisible Art gives blind and partially sighted visitors an opportunity for closer contact with exhibit objects that were previously inaccessible to them, while seeing visitors can expand the boundaries of their experience and better understand the problems faced by those with vision disabilities.  

Invisible Art is the Hermitage’s first large-scale inclusive project, but the museum has made previous attempts at including people with a variety of experiences in their work. For instance, the Hermitage Youth Center trained deaf tour guides in 2018, but after the program, they were only offered the opportunity to work on one major exhibit, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future. Inclusive excursions were conducted for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as part of this exhibition, with half of the groups made up of people with ASD and the other half made up of neurotypical visitors.  

The goal was to create a comfortable environment for people with ASD so that they could discover Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s art. In addition, these excursions gave neurotypical visitors a chance to see people with ASD in a different light and expand their everyday experience. I believe that similar practices need to be continued and developed, but since 2018, the Hermitage has not held events in RSL or offered inclusive excursions.  

Overall, these inclusive programs (apart from Invisible Art) are not conducted regularly and are of a scale too modest for such a large museum, and in my opinion they do not measure up to the international standard for which the Hermitage aims. Nevertheless, there is a hope that Invisible Art will open a new chapter in the museum’s history and that in future, St. Petersburg residents and visitors to the city will be able to see more projects that are accessible to people with a variety of experiences.

The Manege Central Exhibition Hall is also working to create an inclusive environment. Its website is simple, with an “Accessibility” tab prominently featured on the homepage. Visitors can quickly learn about all the opportunities offered by the venue. The site features a social impact story about visiting an exhibition.  

The Manege regularly hosts tours and excursions with translation into RSL and featuring deaf guides. Their YouTube channel offers a playlist of lectures translated into RSL. Audio description guides for blind and partially sighted visitors have been available since May 2021.

In 2018, the Manege opened an inclusive exhibition of tactile sculpture objects called Touch. As with Invisible Art, the project was designed to provide a new experience for the widest possible range of visitors, regardless of whether they have a visual disability or not.  

The Manege also works with individuals with ASD. Together with the Anton’s Right Here Foundation, they host art meditations and creative master classes. In January 2021, a podcast was released in which Foundation students shared their impressions of the exhibition and the excursion. The Manege also runs special excursions for older visitors. On the whole, their inclusive programs are sufficiently varied and regular, offering a good example to other St. Petersburg institutions.

Conclusion

St. Petersburg has countless other institutions that work to adapt their environments for people with different experiences: the Museum of the History of Religion, the Museum of Political History of Russia, the Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House, the Street Art Museum, and others. However, only a few of their inclusive programs are intended to create a space for a wide variety of people to meet and interact. Today, the goal of creating an accessible museum in St. Petersburg is presumed to involve a mere physical adaptation of the space for people with disabilities (excursions and tours translated into RSL, audio guides, etc.), while there are hardly any programs for other categories of visitors. In light of this, we can come to the conclusion that inclusion in St. Petersburg is only beginning to develop. For now, there are few museums and galleries that are already working in accordance with the principles of openness and accessibility. Still, the experiences of the Russian Museum, the Hermitage, the Manege and others are evidence that inclusion is gradually becoming the new normal, and institutions are beginning to move toward creating truly open cultural spaces. In future we hope to see inclusive programs at such landmarks on the city’s cultural map as Pushkinskaya-10, the Sergei Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art, DK Gromov, the Sigmund Freud Dream Museum, and others.

References

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A new level of communication: museum employees master Russian Sign Language [Novyy uroven’ obshcheniya: sotrudniki muzeev osvaivayut russkiy zhestovyy yazyk] // pro.culture.ru. URL: https://pro.culture.ru/blog/569, accessed: 01.12.2021
What is an accessible museum? [Chto takoe dostupnyy muzey?] // artguide.com. URL: https://artguide.com/practices/2313, accessed: 01.12.2021.
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