Traces. Portrait of Rizaeddin Fakhreddin

Rizaeddin Fakhreddin (1859 – 1936) is an encyclopedist, publicist, religious figure and philosopher.

The central mosque of Almetyevsk, as well as one of the town streets bear the name of the prominent Tatar scholar. Born into a family which had to move to Kichuchatovo village from Shyrdan village in fear of the forcible Christianization, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin spent twenty years in madrasa (Muslim educational institution) and mastered six languages by himself. Elected in 1922 as Mufti of Russia and Siberia, he was one of the proponents of emancipation of Eastern women. The educator also was an author of the voluminous bibliographical monograph about the work of Eastern folks and Turkic cultural figures called «Asar». Rizaeddin Fakhreddin stood against the closure of mosques, arrests and destruction of religious libraries. In 1930 he was going to leave a post of Mufti in order to draw the attention of the West to the Soviet persecution of the Muslims. This fact caused a wide public outcry in the religious world. Rizaeddin Fakhreddin's educational role in the Muslim world is comparable to that of Leo Tolstoy, the director of his memorial museum in Kichuchatovo says. In 1926 he became a vice-president of the World Islamic Congress in Mecca, but even he didn't forget to visit small villages, where he said prayers about prosperity and well-being of the local people. After Rizaeddin Fakhreddin's death, a legend has it, thousands of Muslims assembled in his home village and read Janazah, an Islamic funeral prayer.

The double сomposition of the mural is united by a landscape of Kichuchatovo village. On the left side of the diptych we can see a village from the bank of Kichui River. On the right side of it, we look at the village from the top of Otrazhayuschaya Mount. The unifying element of the painting is the depiction of the memorial museum of Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, around which there are centuries-old pines planted by Rizaeddin's parents.

Using the collage technique, Fatum portrays the most significant elements of Rizaeddin Fakhreddin's personal and professional life. If you look at the mural up close, the details seem to be holistic themselves, but meaning only facts. But in the distance each detail turns into a puzzle of a portrait, and we can see an old man. Clouds turn into a turban (a headwear based on cloth winding), pines and house details are becoming the eyes of a wiseman. A cart symbolizing Fakhreddin's path from the countryside to Mecca now is the left side of Rizaeddin's face. This symbolic «cocktail» could not be completed without some hidden details, which could be fully understood only after a thorough study of Rizaeddin Fakhreddin's biography. For instance, the scales on the cart symbolizes his balanced approach to religion: although he remained an outstanding thinker of the Islamic world, he also studied natural science in depth. The latter fact is confirmed by the astrolabe in the lower left side of the main picture. There also can be noticed such details as a sand-glass (underlining the historical activity of Fakhreddin), a card of a convict (reminding the Soviet repressions towards Muslims), and footprints on the ground (referring to the four-volume bibliographic monograph «Asar», the main work of Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, which is still used by people for tracing their ancestries).

Dima Fatum is a Ukrainian street artist and muralist. Having received a classical academic education at the Shevchenko State Art School (he was engaged in easel painting there), Fatum began to paint on the streets. «In the beginning of 2000s I began to learn about hip-hop culture, and I became interested in graffiti», he remembers. «And then I started to experiment». After street art the art exhibitions in galleries were added in his life, and the artist did not completely abandon canvases. His first personal exhibition took place in Odessa, 2011. Now Dima Fatum is also working as a muralist.

Fatum is famous for his artistic method: large scale murals in a collage technique with encrusted elements of optical illusions often reflect the history and social context in places, where the artist works. Dima's artworks can be seen in the Street Art Museum in Saint Petersburg, Ukranian and Moscow galleries. Fatum is a regular participant of European and Ukranian festivals, and he also painted a huge portrait of Sheikh Zayed in 2018 on the wall of The Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, where Formula One motor races take place.