My current birthday coincided with my upcoming personal exhibition, I asked everyone to give me natural objects (I needed stones - amethysts, serpentine). In the wish-list, I openly wrote about this: Give me stones, butterflies, corals. As a result, they brought me cow teeth, twenty dried butterflies, a flask of moss, a praying mantis and many more unusual gifts
Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov, artist
The exhibitions Museum of Poisons is a pesonal project of Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov connecting archeology, biology, and art. Through the use of visual elements of poisonous animals and plants, the artist has formed a peculiar museum of poisons and antidotes, illness protecting amulets and artefacts of the medieval antidote industry.
Moreover, there is hardly any information on poisonous substances available to the public. Such secrecy made this field encrusted with myths and turned it to something for the public mind to speculate on. However, Fedotov-Fedorov accounts this problem at a larger scale. He presents the Internet as a new human environment, where the niche of poisonous animals and plants belongs to data, which can easily turn cause lethal outcomes. That’s why along with other objects, the exhibition features texts borrowed from the Internet – dangerous diets that can sap your health or disputable self-treatment advice, which can cause death if followed. The exhibition analyses the global issue of information reliability, and distinction between truth, fiction, and blatant lies.
Poison Museum is the first part of the large study that the artist is going to continue in Holland, from April till September 2018, under the auspices of the Medical University and the Central Hospital of Amsterdam.
