This week's five exhibitions on time, and on how the living and the man-made deceive it

This week's five exhibitions are about time, and about how the living and the man-made deceive it. There is an artistic dynasty across four generations, newsreel film that stopped the moment, the faces of the theatre, deception as an engine of evolution and, to make up the round number, contemporary art squeezed into the national chronicle.

🎭 “Flights over Time. A Play about the Shterenbergs” at the Maslovka Museum Centre, “Artists' Town”, 5 June to 27 September 2026. More than 200 works by four generations of the dynasty of David Shterenberg, from one of the chief masters of early Soviet modernism to his great-granddaughter. The curators call the display a visual play spanning a century, from the 1920s to the 2020s.

🎥 “Dziga Vertov. Kino-Eye” at the Zotov Centre, February to July 2026. An exhibition-film about a man who believed that the camera saw the world more accurately than the eye, and who wished to assemble a new reality out of life itself.

📷 “Yury Rost. In the Lens of the Sovremennik” at the Sovremennik Theatre, the Other Stage, from 21 June 2026. It opens on Sunday. Rost, a photographer of the humanist school whom Cartier-Bresson included in his last exhibition, has photographed people of the theatre for decades, and so the life of the Sovremennik is shown not through posters but through faces.

🦎 “The Evolution of Lies: From the Chemical Tricks of Bacteria to the Complex Manipulations of Primates” at the Darwin Museum, until 28 June 2026. Deception as an evolutionary strategy: mimicry, camouflage, false signals and outright cheating, from bacteria to apes. The museum constructs the history of lying as a history of adaptation, in which the ability to deceive improves the chances of survival. It closes in a week and a half, so this is rather one to catch while you can.

🏛 “Svoyasi. The Path of Contemporary Russian Art” at the State Historical Museum, May to September 2026. Contemporary art within the walls of the chief national museum is a programmatic gesture in itself; it remains to be seen what kind of art has been selected for this venue, and whether it is really so contemporary and topical.