Exhibition "Fifth Wave" Automatic translate

Continuing the theme of friendly recommendations - the main plot of the 2nd Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art "Beautiful Night of All People", the exhibition "The Fifth Wave" presents the personal choice of the participant of the 1st Triennial, Ivan Novikov, but in an expanded format. As a curator, he set out to show the practices of artists who relatively recently left Russia for study or work and now live in Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and France. The Fifth Wave artists are not united by stylistic, conceptual or political unanimity: they work in completely different mediums, from easel painting to complex performances. They are connected only by the fact that, due to emigration, they are excluded from the context of Russian art.

The "fifth wave" opens in the era of COVID-19, when most of the borders are still closed, and states are doing their best to interrupt migration flows. The isolation and forced disunity that covered the world emphasized the alienation of society from the figure of the migrant. And cultural figures found themselves, perhaps, in one of the most difficult situations in many years. Museums, theaters, cultural centers were forced to cease their work, and the regime of distancing only exacerbated the feeling of alienation.

Perhaps today the very formulation of the question of art localized within one country may seem like something conservative. But 2020 has shown that issues of global integration are still relevant. Borders have not disappeared anywhere, and in some cases have become aggravated. Ignoring expatriate artists hurts culture in general. That is why it is so important to show at the "Fifth Wave" exhibition the artists who left Russia and became "invisible" for the domestic public.

The presented authors emigrated at different ages and under different circumstances. Moreover, not all of them define themselves as emigrants; for many, the term itself seems to be a legacy of the Iron Curtain era. Equally varied are the relationships between the participants in the Fifth Wave and the Russian context. Alexandra Anikina’s “Information Field” builds a narrative about the Soviet past through the prism of the artist’s family history, starting from the image of an ancient ancestral home in the village of Chichevo near Moscow. Installations by Natalia Grezina are immersed in the cultural memory of the artist’s native Sevastopol. Olga Grotova’s abstractions reconstruct the rich context of the Eurasian steppe, where the artist’s great-grandmother survived in one of the gulag camps. Elizaveta Konovalova studies the urban fabric of Kaliningrad,taking the Central Square as a starting point for their visual exploration. The autobiographical video of Margarita Maximova reconstructs the image of her father, whom the artist never met.

Other exhibitors do not need geographic references to the past. The installation Katya Ev is dedicated to the boundaries of civil liberty during a state of emergency. Evgeny Dedov’s study of the pictorial surface becomes a pretext for the esoteric development of his own poetics, based on the repetition of ornamental motives. Angelina Merenkova transforms images of mass culture and network infrastructures into surreal assemblies and sculptures. Yana Smetanina’s painting series Imperfections emphasizes the tension between the inner and outer sensations of bodily beauty. Relying on the depiction of Dada and futurism, Igor Shuklin is looking for the remnants of avant-garde achievements in the bourgeois realities of today. And the "Museum of Sisyphus" by Ivan Murzin, both visually and conceptually, is like an exhibition in an exhibition,offering an absurd and inspiring alternative to hulking art institutions.

Artists: Alexandra Anikina, Natalya Grezina, Olga Grotova, Evgeny Dedov, Elizaveta Konovalova, Margarita Maksimova, Angelina Merenkova, Ivan Murzin, Yana Smetanina, Igor Shuklin, Katya Ev (Ekaterina Vasilyeva)

Curator: Ivan Novikov