Brand identity and visual concept for a multimedia exhibition marking an anniversary of Russia's Union of Theatre Workers.
The exhibition is built around a single object: the box. A crate, a case, a container — the thing that holds everything theatre's existence depends on: touring, storing props and costumes, waiting for a premiere, packing up after a run. Theatre never exists in one place or one time — it's assembled, taken apart, moved. The box became the structural metaphor for that condition.
Each hall corresponds to a period in the theatre's history, expressed through the material of its box: plywood for early, unformed theatre; wood for an established tradition and profession; rough board crates for the tense 1920s–30s; metal for the wartime years; tin for the standardized postwar period; plastic for today's flexible, technology-driven stage. Inside each box: photographs, documents, posters, and objects, laid out as if just unpacked from storage.
The same modular logic runs through the projection design — three screen formats (vertical, square, horizontal), all built from one square segment, so any space in the show can be assembled like a kit.
150 Artists
Client:
National Theatre Society
Year:
APR 30, 2026
Role:
Brand Identity
Graphic design
Art Direction
What Is the Exhibition Made Of?
The exhibition space is built around the image of a box, rendered in different materials — plywood, wood, metal, tin, plastic. Each material marks a historical period, but also reflects the theatre's internal state at that time: how it existed, organized itself, and engaged with reality.
What’s Inside?
Each box holds objects, documents, and images tracing key moments in the life of the National Theatre Society. Every box becomes its own space of memory and meaning — a fragment of a shared theatrical journey.
The exhibition frames theatre as a living process: the past preserved, the present in motion, the future taking shape.
Projected Interactive Book
A physical prop book with blank pages, mapped with projected content and tracked via Kinect — page turns trigger the projection to advance, so the book reads like a real archive even though every spread is projected light.
Design process covered projection alignment to the physical page geometry, gesture calibration for natural page-turn detection, and building the archival visual language (paper texture, typography, redaction marks) to sell the illusion of a real found object.
"Tap to turn the page"
Touch-Table Landing Pages
Interactive story pages built for touch tables placed throughout the exhibition, expanding on people and places referenced in the main displays. Visitors can go deeper into a single story than the wall displays allow, without leaving the room. Design work covered the modular content grid (so any story fits the same page system), typography hierarchy for mixed archival/modern text, and photo treatment to unify images from different eras and sources into one consistent tone.
Installation Views
Photography from the finished exhibition space — showing how the "box" concept extended past the flat panels into full physical set pieces built for each hall.
Highlights: a wartime front-line theatre stage, mounted on a truck bed and used to bring performances to soldiers along the front; an antique thunder machine (a mechanical sound-effects drum from period theatres), staged inside the Imperial Russian Theatrical Society hall; an aged doorway marking the passage between sections; and a set of fragmented, brutalist-colored sculptural forms built for the Meyerhold/Constructivism corner. The 2D concept boards translated directly into built environments — same material logic, same palette, staged at full scale.
