Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre at 25

Sharmanka's home has been in Scotland for over twenty years, far from Eduard's birthplace in Russia. The artist speaks very little English, is concise in Russian, but most expressive communicating via his machines, where the fine balances of reverie and nightmare, paradise and hell, joy and pain make deep connections with international audiences of all ages. Bersudsky's "magic toy shop", as actor Simon Callow calls it, comes to life at Glasgow's T103 Arts Centre where Eduard works with theatre director Tatyana Jakovskaya and lighting designer Sergey Jakovsky. Sculpture titles range from the Master and Margarita, inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov's novel to Jock's Jokes, in homage to a much-loved Borders chimney sweep.

Born a few days after the declaration of World War II in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) Eduard is essentially self-taught. He attended some evening classes in a sculpture studio, but soon tired of reproducing what he saw, prefering "to fantasise, to invent forms, images, and then give out what was born in my head. Then an unexpected opportunity turned up to get a job for the Parks Department - to carve bears, lions and other animals in wood for the town parks. It is not easy to get an image out of a log, to make it alive." Sadly, little of this work is extant, as these majestic wooden beasts were allowed to rot away.

"My brother managed to get me a job as a blacksmith in a military factory. My teacher was a very good man, Alexey Pigaliev, he taught me how to cut metal, how to make threads on bolts and so on. I made a wooden sculpture which turned out to be partly Tolstoy and partly Dostoevsky, I put this motor inside, made a moving hand and got my first organ grinder. I still keep the first kinemat I made. He rotated the handle very slowly and I was ecstatic. I jumped back about three metres and watched it: it was moving by itself! It is impossible to put this feeling into words."

Bersudsky's work evolved in style and complexity across two decades from the late sixties, within his apartment where his companion was a crow with a damaged wing. Birds - especially corvids - are a leitmotif throughout Eduard's creations, alongside figures straddling human and animal worlds, jesters and grotesques. The wellspring of childhood imagery took on a darker countenance with time. The underground culture among non-comformist artists attracted the attention of officials. During the Brezhnev era, large scale exhibitions proved too popular for comfort within the KGB, and Eduard's group of friends became subject to harrassment. Some disappeared.

One in particular, Rita Klimova, was arrested for being part of Samizdat, copying and distributing banned literature by the likes of Mikhail Bulgakov and Václav Havel. Eduard attended Rita's trial and recalls "the prosecutor made a speech, almost demanding punishment by death, but then showed leaniency by asking to give her one year in prison and one year in exile." Rita received a de facto death sentence: she was sent to Chita and exposed to a deadly amount of radiation near an old uranium mine. "The story of Rita Klimova was a turning point", recalls Tatyana Jakovskaya, "till this moment Eduard was not interested in politics, but this series of events suddenly connected him with a different circle of people and ideas. It was the moment he became a dissident."

In the late eighties Eduard was working as a gas boiler operator and experiencing depression. Then a friend called Victor Schwarz brought Tatyana to see his work. "The whole universe - or a theatre, or possibly both at once - were cramped in the 18 metre square room", she says. "I realised that whatever I could do myself - I was a successful theatre director - my choice was to help him do the unique thing he was making, rather than my own stuff. I was growing up in the underground culture that existed under the communist regime. I was one of many people who thought it was better to sacrifice your ego to help someone do something better than you can do."

As the 1990s began, the era of Perestroika was drawing to a close and Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre was born. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought severe economic downturn. By the time Michael Palin visited Sharmanka in 1993 for his Pole to Pole journeys, he sensed it could not survive in Russia and looked optimistically towards Eduard's first trip out of the country to take part in a festival in Glasgow.

Wood artist Tim Stead and his wife Maggy had seen Eduard's work and immediately wanted to arrange an exhibition. This happened in May 1994 when Julian Spalding, then director of Glasgow Museums, brought Sharmanka to the MacLellan Galleries. A cottage was vacant nearby Stead's base in Blainslie, offering possibilities as both home and workshop, so Eduard, Tatyana and her son Sergey moved there, relocating Sharmanka to Glasgow in 1996.

Soon, Sharmanka sculptures animated daily in Glasgow's newly-opened Gallery of Modern Art and became GOMA's most popular attraction. However, in spite of popularity, Sharmanka was deemed unsuitable for GOMA, where conceptual works became the new fashion. "The point of definitions causes major problems", says Tatyana.

A collaboration between Eduard Bersudsky and Tim Stead was inevitable. It came with the Millennium Clock, for the Royal Museum in Edinburgh. Intuitive empathy surpassed their lack of a common language. Tatyana explains: "Eduard looks at some piece of wood or some junk and suddenly "wait a moment, if we join this to this..." Tim Stead never made drawings of his sculpture. He could see what was inside wood". Drawings were required to satisfy commissioners, so Maggy Stead supplied those, even though they had nothing to do with what Tim and Eduard were making!

Last year Sharmanka grew so popular it had to open seven days a week, playing extra shows. Independent reviews posted to the TripAdvisor website saw Sharmanka climb in Glasgow's list of attractions to a point where it jockeyed in the top three positions alongside Kelvingrove Museum and Glasgow School of Art - this in a time of immense tourism for the city. Remarkable for a hidden treasure, tucked away on the first floor of a building on Trongate. However, at the end of 2014, TripAdvisor changed its system, moving Sharmanka from their "Attractions" category to "Activities", where it has to compete anew. The problem of defining Sharmanka persists, even as it attains its silver jubilee. As the old phrase goes, the struggle continues!