Installation views: Ekaterina Foundation, Moscow
New Landscape is a joint curatorial effort with Anastasia Tsayder. The exhibition brings together 7 contemporary Russian photographers to explore the new Russian landscape, as well as new Russian landscape photography. The exhibition was first shown in 2018 at Yeltsin Centre in Yekaterinburg drawing over 20 000 visitors in 2 ½ months. The show then toured 5 Russian cities: Moscow, Kazan, Krasnoyarsk, Perm, Tyumen.
At each venue the exhibition was accompanied by a public programme with location-specific events ranging from discussions and lectures to workshops in contemporary art photography. The speakers included prominent philosophers, sociologists, art historians, architects such as Alexander Filippov, Alexandr Veleykis, Anton Gorlenko, Boris Klushnikov, Dmitry Bezouglov, Ekaterina Inozemtseva, Erika Wolf, Kirill Asse, Oleg Pachenkov, Sergei Sitar, Vitaly Kurennoj, Yury Grigoryan. The public programme at Yeltsin Cebtre in Ekaterinburg culminated in a stage reading of Dmitry Danilov’s play A Man from Podolsk.
Installation views: Yeltsin Centre, Ekaterinburg; State Art Museum, Kazan
Ekaterina Inozemtseva
Art Historian, Curator
Lucius Burckhardt once remarked that the very word landscape implies that we are dealing with a certain concept only existing in our heads. Landscape is a technical term and used in relation to the idillic and repeatedly lauded in art Swiss landscape it means that what we actually see is not nature, but a landscape shaped by man, where people are engaged in agriculture, rural tourism, industry, etc. It is not just a suitable backdrop for our leisure or aesthetic studies. The more you know about the landscape in sight, the more intensely and thoroughly you can enjoy it. According to Burckhardt, studying geologic and geographic maps of an area, understanding the specifics of vegetation and geomorphological processes should make the landscape truly engulfing, make it reveal itself in an entirely different way. Its beauty in the eye of the beholder will be warranted by the garnered knowledge, the intellectual experience.
In the case of the works featured in this exhibition the studies of literature on geology or botanics should be replaced by more complex processes, dealing less so with knowledge or information. These processes will have more to do with reviving the collective and personal memory, the study of the particular social phenomena, architecture, etc. Looking at the featured works one cannot help but feel that to actually see nature, to develop an affection for a certain primeval landscape is scarcely possible. The Anthropocene has made it extinct.
The primary subject for each of the artists is not the landscape as such but the variety of ways it is interfered with, the hybrid lifeforms brought to life not by a particular agent, but rather by the global humanity, the phenomena of the social, commercial or industrial origin, which reshape the visible image of the world and create the new post-industrial pastorale.
More information is available at newlandscape.info
Download the presentation file (pdf)
Interview with Anastasia Tsayder and Petr Antonov — Urbanautica
Interview with Anastasia Tsayder and Petr Antonov — InRussia Magazine
Photographs of Russian landscape in place of urban development manuals — Strelka Magazine (Russian language)
Exhibition catalogue