Exhibition "New Russian Landscape"

From September 18 to October 28, 2021, the First Biennale of Contemporary Art is being held in Yaroslavl, which was organized at the initiative of the Scientific and Organizational Directorate for the coordination of fundamental scientific research programs of the Russian Academy of Arts and with the support of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Arts.

Official hashtag of events: #YarBiennale2021

Link to the official website of the event: yarbiennale.ru

In Yaroslavl, since 2010, all-Russian scientific and practical conferences, symposia, plein airs and exhibitions organized by members of the Russian Academy of Arts have been held with great success. Some of these events were held within the framework of a cooperation agreement with the Yaroslavl Center for Contemporary Art "House of Muses", the founder of which is the laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation, honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, Oleg Alekseevich Zharov. The first Biennale of Contemporary Art is a continuation of the fruitful cooperation of the Russian Academy of Arts with Yaroslavl. The project was also supported by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Moscow Union of Artists, the Yaroslavl branch of the Union of Artists of Russia, the Center for Contemporary Art “House of Muses”, the society “Cultural Bridge. Traveling Exhibitions ".

The theme of the First Biennale of Contemporary Art - "New Russian Landscape" - was not chosen by chance. Yaroslavl is a city with its own history of fine arts. First of all, these are magnificent fresco ensembles, a collection of icon painting and applied art. In the shadow of this powerful layer of cultural heritage is Yaroslavl painting of the XX-XXI centuries, which also has its own face and school. The organizers set a global task - to fully show this unique phenomenon in the context of contemporary art.

Curators are based on the potential that the city and Yaroslavl artists have today. But the special guests of the festival will be the President of the Russian Academy of Arts Zurab Tsereteli, as well as academicians of the Russian Academy of Arts Pavel Nikonov, Viktor Kalinin, Nikolai Mukhin, whose names are inscribed in the history of Russian art, and their works will be shown at different venues of the Biennale.

The younger generation will be represented by Evgenia Buravleva, Yegor Plotnikov, Pavel Otdelnov, Pavel Blokhin, Alexey Maltsev, Yulia Malinina, Fedor Toshchev, Alexey Myakishev, Alexey Khamkin, Irina Filatova, Max Sher, Elena Tsitsulina, Keith Yamaguchi (Japan) and other masters.

The main exhibition area of the Biennale will open on September 28, 2021 at 16:00 in the Yaroslavl Center for Contemporary Art "House of Muses" (Yaroslavl, Tchaikovskogo St., 23a). Its curator, artist Evgenia Buravleva, proposed the theme "New Russian Landscape", which served as the leitmotif of the entire festival. The project was supported by the President of the Russian Academy of Arts Z. K. Tsereteli, who always pays great attention to cultural policy in the regions. The exposition will show the works of academicians and members of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Arts Pavel Nikonov, Viktor Kalinin, Nikolai Mukhin.

The project dedicated to the new Russian landscape in Yaroslavl seems to be appropriate for the place and time. The culture of this region is associated with the tradition of Russian landscape through Levitan, Savrasov, Kustodiev, Petrovichev to contemporary Yaroslavl artists who continue to work in the genre of plein air painting.

Attempts to comprehend the changes that have taken place in the Russian landscape after the collapse of the USSR over the past few years have led to the emergence of not only serious exhibition projects: “Metageography. Space - Image - Action ”(Tretyakov Gallery, 2015-16, curators Nikolai Smirnov and Kirill Svetlyakov),“ New Landscape ”(Ekaterina Foundation, 2019, curators Anastasia Tsayder and Petr Antonov),“ On the Edges ”(VDNKh, 2018, curators Kristina Romanova, Nail Farhatdinov), but also large open-air practices in almost every region, for example, "Russian Atlantis", and in Yaroslavl itself - "Russian Seasons".

From studies of human perception of the space in which he lives, to the hand-made embodiment of the states of nature - such a wide range suggests that the theme of the new Russian landscape, rethought through the history of Russian plein air painting, Soviet art, the study of local contexts and new practices in art, seems very timely for the search for a new language and means of communication between different artistic communities and society as a whole.

The artists represented in this project are practically “fathers and children”. Combining their works in one exhibition is an opportunity to reveal both common ideas and differences in the perception of space. Immersion in the environment, in the specific features of the modern Russian landscape, leads to generalization to such universal concepts as childhood, life, death, utopia, destruction, disappearance and memory. Each artist chooses different ways of working with such important categories.

The theme of memory and disappearance is one of the central and painful for the post-Soviet space. The act of the disintegration of a large country led to the abandonment and desolation of vast territories. Nature filled the unoccupied places with incredible speed. That which was abandoned, but not absorbed by nature, acquired the status of "no place", together with the people who lived there, found itself on the periphery and was left to itself. But everyday life glimmers in such places. People are trying to decorate it and make it more human in accessible ways. What cannot be mastered remains a blind spot.

The more dramatically experienced attitude to the new reality, characteristic of the senior participants in the project, is adjacent to the observation of the “side view” of the younger ones. Those who grew up in the late Soviet years could only observe what was happening during the disintegration of the country, not being able to take part in what was happening due to their age. White spots, disappeared settlements and roads - all that remained to yesterday’s pioneers. They noticed things that were beyond the attention of adults involved in maintaining a normal life. If the works of the elders rather demonstrate a desire to catch the receding, elusive past, to create an ideal world inside at least small zones, then the landscapes and heroes of the “younger” participants that hang in nowhere and in the twilight zone of timelessness are paused and exist in a waiting mode.

The presented works, performed in different techniques, demonstrate several ways of communication of artists with the surrounding space and time. Zurab Tsereteli presents the project of a children’s park in Mnevniki by Zurab Tsereteli, an active desire for change and the creation of a new world, a dream of utopia, anticipation of the emergence of new forms of social and public zones. In the works of Pavel Nikonov and Viktor Kalinin, there is a drama of an endless experience of a tragedy of a universal scale in a long-familiar landscape. Elena Tsitsulina sympathetically observes the orphaned garages, mountains, houses and flocks in Tyrnyauz and Rostov. Maxim Sher’s large-scale series of photographs is a panoramic view of the world of new aesthetics,born from the impossibility and unwillingness to preserve the classic proportions of the old world and the desire of people to make their lives better quickly and from any materials at hand.

Irina Filatova and Keito Yamaguchi seem to fragment the world from Cher’s photographs, working with the details and characteristic features of the new Russian landscape, clumsy houses, fences, pipes and people who merge with the environment, as if they want to hide in it. The fruits of the new economic reality and the half-asleep existence of industrial zones and transport hubs are explored in the works of Pavel Otdelnov, Yulia Malinina, Alexei Maltsev. The escapism of the refined landscapes of Pavel Blokhin and the subtle interventions in the landscape of Fyodor Toshchev demonstrate a look in a completely “different direction”. Working with memory that has disintegrated into fragments, dissolved in lines, disappeared behind a white veil, leaving the characters in the twilight zone, unites Yegor Plotnikov, Olga Davydova, Alexei Khamkin, Evgenia Buravleva.Dreams of an ideal city are embodied in the works of Nikolai and Nadezhda Mukhin. In the photographs of Alexei Myakishev there is an answer to the questions asked by people in space - to be like children, playing, running, learning, traveling in a new world.

In the Russian landscape, which has hardly changed since the times of Savrasov and Levitan, artists continue to find new images and meanings. The verticals of the bell towers were replaced by high-rise buildings, but the roads leading to them are still picturesque in Russian, children still play on the abandoned river banks, travelers are still wandering, but now there is a chain store in the place of the tavern at the outpost. Agriculture has been replaced by trade, but the fields remain, and the sheep are still flocking to the flock. The methods and means used by artists are changing, but the stormy sky and foggy distances still excite a person. The sincere attitude towards the portrayed, the desire to speak on important topics has not changed either. After all, we all also live in "interesting" times.

Material prepared on the basis of the release of the organizers of the Biennale

Project participants: Zurab Tsereteli, Pavel Nikonov, Viktor Kalinin, Nikolai Mukhin, Pavel Blokhin, Egor Plotnikov, Pavel Otdelnov, Alexey Maltsev, Yulia Malinina, Fedor Toshchev, Alexey Myakishev, Keito Yamaguti, Alexey Khamkin, Irina Filatova, Maxim Sher, Elena Tsitsulina, Olga Davydova, Nadezhda Mukhina, Evgenia Buravleva.