Anastasiia Fedorova on how Moscow’s thriving contemporary art scene is looking beyond Russia and proving that, despite our national differences, it’s global issues that unite us<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[10965,10966,10964,10963,10961,10962,10967],"class_list":["post-69469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-aslan-gaisumov","tag-evgeny-antufiev","tag-garage-museum-of-contemporary-art","tag-moscow-international-biennale-of-young-art","tag-russian-art","tag-sofya-skidan","tag-taus-makhacheva"],"acf":{"main_category":139,"legacy":false,"hero_title":"Global and local Russian art","subtitle":"Anastasiia Fedorova on how Moscow's thriving contemporary art scene is looking beyond Russia and proving that, despite our national differences, it's global issues that unite us","hero":{"video":false,"image":false,"header_color":"black","overlay_color":"","overlay_text_color":"black"},"teasers":{"video":false,"image":false,"width":"4","proportion":"natural"},"facebook_image":false,"related_articles":[69055,68830,67207],"next_article":[69055],"content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"images","gallery":false,"settings":{"fit_width":"10","caption":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_area","text_area":"
At Fragment Gallery in the centre of Moscow, I make my way through a room that feels like a translucent labyrinth. The floor is covered with waves of white soft material and numerous videos flick on fine sheer fabric hanging from the ceiling. The videos are a fluid collage of alien-looking natural landscapes, insta-stories and stray images. Together with glossy photo-sculptures, bits of black plastic, scented smoke and coloured moss, it\u2019s an immersive experience of the future yet to come: post-human, post-gender, post-digital. The exhibition, titled Transverse Hyperspace<\/em><\/a>, is the debut show of emerging Russian artist Sofya Skidan. Skidan is a recent graduate of Moscow\u2019s Rodchenko School of Multimedia and Photography, and a Russian artist of the new hyper-connected era, keen to take on questions which sprawl much further than the borders of Russia and its national narratives.<\/p>\n In the Western cultural narrative, Russia is often viewed through the prism of otherness. The fashion world has become obsessed with Russia in recent years, thanks to the so-called \u201cpost-Soviet aesthetic\u201d movement which manifested through the work of designer Gosha Rubchinskiy and stylist Lotta Volkova. During a time of intensifying political isolation, fashion and photography channelled the new authentic youth culture movement \u2014 but through the lens of \u201cpoor but sexy\u201d post-Soviet stereotypes. Russian contemporary art, however, is a completely different story: a manifestation of the growing global connection emerging beyond the ghostly walls of 20th-century history.<\/p>\n"},{"acf_fc_layout":"images","gallery":false,"settings":{"fit_width":"6","caption":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_area","text_area":" Summer 2018 paved the way for a moment of newfound cultural dialogue in Russia. During the month of the FIFA World Cup, Russian cities were flooded with thousands of visitors from all over the world. They may not have been art buffs exactly, but many were lucky to witness Pussy Riot\u2019s performance \u201cThe Policeman Enters the Game\u201d during the final. Away from the football buzz, the sixth Moscow International Biennale of Young Art took place in venues across the city, uniting over 60 emerging young artists from across the globe. Together, they explored the particularities of the contemporary human condition: constant consumption, constant online presence and our subsequent fatigue. Underneath the isolationist political narrative well-known in the West, the currents of a new global-minded Russian culture were rising.<\/p>\n This summer, Russia\u2019s key contemporary art institution, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, celebrated its ten-year anniversary. Located in the Gorky Park, Garage Museum occupies a former Soviet restaurant, a modernist structure brought back to life by Rem Koolhaas and his OMA studio in 2015. Garage Museum is well known for bringing global blockbuster artists to Moscow \u2014 Takashi Murakami, Rashid Johnson and Juergen Teller, to name but a few. But aside from attracting big names, Garage has been doing hugely important work to educate its audience about contemporary art: it has an expansive public programme; pioneers inclusivity; supports young Russian artists through grants, and in September is planning to open a number of artist studios, available to Russian and international artists.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we started Garage ten years ago, we had ten thousand visitors a year, and last year we finished with 700 thousand,\u201d says Anton Belov, director of the museum. \u201cI think people\u2019s perception of contemporary art is changing \u2014 and much faster I expected. Even classical institutions, such as the Pushkin Museum and Tretyakov Gallery are now investing in contemporary art. I thought for the changes we\u2019re seeing now to come about we would need 20 or 30 years, but they\u2019re already here. People here are hungry for culture, that’s why everything is changing so quickly. \u201d\u00a0Today Moscow remains the centre of the Russian art world, with spaces like Fragment Gallery and ISSMAG<\/a> championing emerging names, but its biggest cultural developments often happen outside of the country \u2014 in the international context of Manifesta and biennials in Liverpool, Riga and Venice.<\/p>\n"},{"acf_fc_layout":"images","gallery":false,"settings":{"fit_width":"6","caption":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_area","text_area":" In the programme of this year\u2019s Liverpool Biennial, Aslan Gaisumov<\/a> showed his recent video works which address personal and collective memory and history. Keicheyuhea\u00a0<\/em>(2017) follows the artist\u2019s grandmother as she returns to her lost homeland in the mountainous scenery of the North Caucasus for the first time since the displacement of her family 73 years earlier. People of No Consequence\u00a0<\/em>(2016) documents the gathering of a group of elderly men and women, all survivors of the 1944 Soviet deportation of the Chechen and Ingush nations to Central Asia. These stories are rooted in the history of Gaisumov\u2019s native Chechnya but unmistakably relate to the current processes in the contemporary world. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in exporting local into global, and in Chechnya everyone thinks that we\u2019re the centre of the world anyway,\u201d Gaisumov says. \u201cOn the contrary, I want to define and preserve something inside the context of where my works are created\u201d.<\/p>\n Displayed at Manifesta 12 in Palermo, works by Evgeny Antufiev<\/a> also exist in the balance of local and universal. Antufiev often refers to shamanic practices common in his native Siberian Tuva region. At the same time, his ceramics, wooden works, castings and carvings combine imagination with aspects of different international cultures and personal stories. They are endlessly relatable, just like ancient fairytales, dreams and fears.<\/p>\n"},{"acf_fc_layout":"images","gallery":false,"settings":{"fit_width":"6","caption":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_area","text_area":" With a background in Russia\u2019s Dagestan region, Taus Makhacheva had works displayed at three international biennials this Summer. At Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, she showed a collection of speakers on tripods all of which transmitted recorded messages apologising for the delayed reply to an email. For the Liverpool Biennial, she created an ASMR spa<\/a>: reclining on a specially produced sculpture (by Russian artist Alexander Kutovoi), the visitor received a facial while listening to the history of the lost art. At Manifesta 12, she showed Baida<\/a>, a video installation which combines a conversation about the challenges of artistic work with the stories of illegal fishermen on the Caspian Sea. \u201cI don\u2019t feel like I belong to a geography,” Makhacheva comments. “I feel much more like exploring the bigger belonging which I share with other artists\u201d.<\/p>\n Working on the intersection of local and global, Russian artists today are asking questions relevant worldwide. How much do our heritage and political circumstances define us? In the world we live in, the global issues we face are much bigger than our national differences. We come with our own unique stories \u2014 but we\u2019re all in this together.<\/p>\n"}]},"yoast_head":"\n