Sergey Guskov

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  picks February 16, 2022

  Xenia Kudrina

  Located in part of what used to be imperial stables, ISSMAG gallery is known for its chamber format. With the exhibition program “Camera Solitaria,” curator (and director of Moscow art school Institute BAZA) Svetlana Baskova takes the space-saving one step further, allowing each selected artist to use only one wall per show. For Left by the Fishers of Men, 2022, Xenia Kudrina painstakingly reconstructed an actual interior from her hometown Lensk in Yakutia, a region in Russia’s Far East. The wooden wall panels are lined with semi-empty bookshelves, grotesque masks, fishing nets, faded photos,

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  picks January 27, 2022

  “The TV Trampoline: From Children’s Television to Contemporary Art and Literature”

  Now on view at the cultural center Fabrika, this exhibition gauges the impact of television on the generation that came of age in Sweden from the 1960s through the ’80s, ultimately questioning whether such programming should be considered part of world heritage. The eleven shows mentioned—among them Sesame Street and the Czechoslovakian cartoon The Mole—played a significant role in shaping the collective unconscious. Their influence [j1] was not bound by geography; the Soviet cartoon Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena is extremely popular in Japan, while Russia adores the Swedish Pippi Longstocking

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  picks October 08, 2021

  Pavel Otdelnov

  Every two years, the Ural Industrial Biennial draws a throng of creative professionals to the borders of Siberia, reenergizing the art scene in the neighboring regions of the host city Yekaterinburg. One of the small towns benefitting this year is Snezhinsk, which incorporates the partially abandoned village Sokol, the former site of a nuclear-research laboratory. Access to the area is still restricted, especially for foreigners.

  As part of the artist-in-residence program of the Sixth Ural Industrial Biennial, Pavel Otdelnov chose Sokol as the setting for his exhibition “Ringing Trace.” The show

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  picks September 14, 2021

  “Elovoy and the Surroundings”

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  picks May 06, 2021

  Genevieve Goffman

  Once a Moscow staple, the project space Money Gallery recently moved north to Saint Petersburg, where it set up shop in a former garage in one of the city’s hallowed courtyards. Forgoing the visible pipes, flaking walls, and other signs of gritty “authenticity” so beloved in the erstwhile capital, gallery founders Ilya Smirnov and Anna Teterkina purged the space of any visual clutter, painting the walls white and the floor red. For the inaugural exhibition, a square white pedestal in the middle of the space is crowned with Grind, 2021, a single sculpture by New York–based artist Genevieve Goffman.

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  picks April 29, 2021

  Alexey Pankin

  Alexey Pankin drew the title of this exhibition, “He feels at home in the May beetle song,” from a poem by Paul Celan which itself references a German folk ditty written during the bloody wars of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Here, the artist, presents twelve of his latest untitled pieces, designed with 3-D modelling software and milled from wood. Stage lights cut through the darkened galleries, snatching a progression of human-shaped figures out of the blackness. Though the majority of the sculptures are suspended in strange, IKEA-like aluminum frames, others sit directly on the

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  picks January 29, 2021

  Vladimir Kartashov

  This show, titled “Innocent Pranks. Technorococo,” marks the fourth exhibition organized by curator Sergey Khachaturov to feature the twenty-three-year-old Vladimir Kartashov. In 2018, the artist filled an entire hall of the Tsaritsyno Estate Museum with human-sized superhero and villain figures on canvas for the group show “Space Hypnosis.” A year later, in “Cosmorama XVIII,” he used plastic miniatures to erect a few rayoks—Russian traditional fairground peep shows—within the Museum of Moscow. (The third show, “The Concert of Birds,” is currently up at Tsaritsyno.) If these mischievous undertakings

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  picks November 17, 2020

  Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev

  Located in two capacious spaces on the second and fortieth floors of Moscow’s Mercury City Tower, gallery ILONA—K, the latest addition to Moscow’s art scene, opened with “Drowning by Numbers,” a presentation of works made over the last ten years by the artist duo Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev. The fantastically expensive real estate of the venue resonates with the shiny monumentalism of No Comment, 2013, an installation of large, gleaming balls and various pyramidal and spruce-shaped objects (reminiscent of sex toys) arranged on the floor. Here and elsewhere, these artists work in a post-Pop conceptual

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  picks August 05, 2020

  Andrey Bogush & Nikita Alexeev

  For this two-artist exhibition, Osnova—a young gallery that recently decamped from the decaying, privately owned Winzavod Center for Art for new digs on the opposite side of Moscow—joined forces with the veteran Galerie Iragui to present an intergenerational pairing of Russian artists. Osnova puts forward several artworks by Andrey Bogush, including two tiny clay sculptures and four digital prints—relics from the short but noisy era of post-internet art, they combine photography, CGI geometric figures, and digital scribbles against simple backgrounds. Iragui contributes two series, both 2020,

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  picks March 24, 2020

  Maria Safronova

  Actual and fictional, or fictionalized, catastrophes have been increasingly mixed up in modern consciousness. From recent ecological disasters resonating with HBO’s Chernobyl and the disintegration of half of all life in Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, to speculative discussions about the dismantling of democracy in the wake of COVID-19, the postapocalyptic turn in culture and society is well underway, and we are only belatedly taking notice.

  Inspired by Soviet educational posters, the two series of paintings presented in Maria Safronova’s exhibition “What If?” portray the lead-up to and the

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  picks January 22, 2020

  Jura Shust

  Slavic mythology meets a globalized illicit industry and sacral rituals move to digital platforms in Jura Shust's “NEOPHYTE,” the Berlin-based Belarusian artist's inaugural show at Fragment Gallery. At the exhibition’s entrance, a wall installation of iron soleplates outfitted with green strobe lights illuminates a display of onions growing in wine glasses—an allusion to Soviet home gardening and to the anonymous web-browsing software Tor (also known as “The Onion Router”). The next room houses more strange things: a crushed bicycle suspended from the ceiling and encrusted with fern fronds and