As reported on the website of French Embassy in Turkmenistan French Institute of Turkmenistan was held the opening of the exhibition “Blocqueville, a Frenchman among the Turkmens”.
From the entrance, the Turkmen yurt and handicrafts that have taken over the courtyard of the Institute plunged visitors into the atmosphere of a Turkmen village like the one where the French Henri Couliboeuf of Blocqueville lived for 14 months in the middle of the XIXth century.
The author of the novel “The Stranger”, Atadjan Tagan, was present and said a few words after the speeches by the Ambassador and the director of the Institute.
And to launch the exhibition, the young actors of the theater group led by IFT teacher Aynabat Gandymova played an excerpt from the play by Atadjan Tagan, for the first time in French.
The exhibition was spread over three rooms. The first presented illustrations from Blocqueville’s story, published on his return to France in the review Le Tour du Monde, and was also interested in the novel by author Atadjan Tagan. The public was able to observe pages of the manuscript and different editions of the work, translated into Uzbek, Tajik and Russian. The second room was concerned with the staging of the history of Blocqueville at the theater, notably with the costumes used in the play produced by the Pushkin theater. Finally, the third room exhibited the work of participants in the competition launched by the FTI for the illustration of the cover of a future publication in French of the novel by Atadjan Tagan. 14 Turkmen artists participated in this competition.
During the opening, visitors were able to vote for their favorite painting. A draw was held to win tickets for a performance of the play at the Pushkin theater.
Thus, by its vote, the public counted as a member of the jury. The rest of the jury was made up of François Delahousse, Ambassador of France to Turkmenistan, Ruslan Myradov, architect and historian, and Catherine Poujol, director of the French Institute for Studies in Central Asia, who voted from a distance.
One of the works presented was almost unanimous, since it came out on top of the vote for the public and three of the four jurors: this is the illustration submitted by Rakhman Rakhmanov.
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