"Journey to the Center of the Earth"

Participants: Anastasia Bogomolova, Sergey Bratkov, Pavel Volkov, Levon Gasparyan, Ivan Gorshkov, Ilya Grishaev, Alexey Dobrov, EliKuka, Andrei Ishonin, Peter Kiryusha, Taisiya Krugovyh, Where the dogs run, Konstantin Larin, Damir Muratov, Ivan Murzin, Icing architect Nati and Alexey Pushkarev, Alena Tereshko, Ivan Tuzov, Oleg Ustinov, Dmitry Fedorov

The exhibition project “Journey to the Center of the Earth” is dedicated to the task of researching and showing the creative potential of contemporary Russian artists, their ability to engage in visual art in the current situation of the hypercentralization of Russian cultural life.

Our project announces a new stage in independent contemporary Russian art - the contemporary underground.

The current underground, of course, has little in common with the nonconformists of the seventies and eighties. The absence of the Iron Curtain and digital technology have clearly changed both the artistic environment and the whole context of domestic life. However, despite the common information field, regionality in Russia is a significant word, a concept behind completely different identities, lifestyles, visual traditions, which are still opposed to the unifying effect of mass culture.

In order to combine diverse creative searches in one project, the curators decided to focus on a type of creativity that manifests itself in the form of a reaction to everyday life, since dialogue and confrontation with the ordinary are one of the important “motors” of artistic activity in Russia. This existential turn is a new non-conformism, since it is about independence from servicing artists with both ideological and commercial orders, which today can also be attributed to the orders of large art institutions implementing a policy of spectacular populism.

“Journey to the center of the Earth” is overcoming the situation of the lack of freedom of art with the help of art itself, just as underground artists survived during the Soviet era: other forms of existence were recognized and played out as “character”, role-playing games. Young Russian artists also try on the masks of medical quacks, wise managers, blinkered designers, and even artisans.

The explosive revenge of love and irony, carelessness and sarcasm can, as it seems, if not to improve the national cultural situation, then at least open new internal resources for it. Moreover, if the conceptualist underground was located mainly in Moscow and Leningrad, now we are talking about a whole network - or rather, a rhizome that stretches across the entire territory of our country and connected artists from different regions.