Irina Drozd

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents an exhibition of the “Nepokorennye” studio entitled Nepokorennye Prospect which is held in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the studio. The exhibition title takes the name of the street in St. Petersburg on which the studio is located. The twenty participants presented in the show express themselves using a variety of art forms, from easel and monumental painting to performance and installation. Their work appears individually or within an area designated for each artist in the exhibition space.

Set up by the alumni of the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design in 2007, the open studio Nepokorennye continues the tradition of forming artistic enclaves as an alternative to academic institutions. Lying at the core of the studio is the idea of creating both a creative environment to unite young artists of post-Soviet Russia and a new context in which art can grow within St. Petersburg’s artistic scene. The studio’s residents do not form a new artistic movement, nor do they associate themselves with an existing one. Instead, they are clearly asserting themselves as a phenomenon of space.

The idea of a uniting space served as an impulse for both the concept and design of the show. As the curator Anastasia Shavlokhova puts it, the exhibition is partly inspired by Timothy Morton’s phrase “contact becomes content.” It is the continuing communication between participants as they work in a communal space that makes mutual influence on both form and content inevitable. The exhibition aims to reveal this complex structure of internal relations.

Alongside the collective endeavor to develop the studio as an artistic enclave, common to all participants, each artist continues to pursue a more personal goal, that of the search of formal means that could marry traditional schools and practices with contemporary art. Therefore, the Nepokorennye Prospect exhibition will demonstrate the results of attempts to address the issues of contemporary art with instruments acquired in academia. Among the twenty artists participating include Alan Hatagty, Ilya Gaponov, and Irina Drozd.

The anniversary exhibition shows the studio recognizing itself both as a phenomenon on its own and reflecting on its place in the history of art alliances. While the participants spent the first five years investing their efforts in the communal project of the studio, the following five years saw each of them focused on his or her own path. Having returned to these former stages in order to present this show, the artists now have no choice but to move on, as it is only by moving forward that one can change one’s thinking framework.

The Nepokorennye studio exhibition is a continuation of MMOMA’s research program dedicated to the St. Petersburg’s school.

This exhibition is held as part of the Parallel Program of the 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Nepokorennye Prospect
September 9 – November 12, 2017
MMOMA Moscow Museum of Modern Art