Presented at Pennlab Gallery in Moscow in 2021, Time and Place brought together projects created by Alexander Gronsky over the past 15 years— Pastoral, 2018, Schema (in collaboration with Ksenia Babushkina), as well as new works. The exhibition, seemingly a complex puzzle in space and time, questions the perception of an image as a truthful document of ’reality’—and at the same time deconstructs our automatisms in the perception of reality as such. The project makes it obvious that photography, even being completely documentary and unmanipulated, devoid of symbolism and interpretation, deceives—but only if we are ready to be deceived.

The exhibition was accompanied by a public programme focusing on the topic of similarities and repetitions in the urban environment in a wider context. The speakers included experts in the field of architecture, urbanism, design, as well as art historians, such as Ekaterina Inozemtseva, Nata Volkova, Yuri Grigorian, Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper, Irina Kulik, Alina Kvirkvelia, Artem Staborovsky. The public programme was curated by Alena Shlyakhovaya.

Time and Place is a joint curatorial effort with Anastasia Tsayder