A special project of the 6th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art in Tobolsk has drawn to a close
24 november 2021
On November 21, the Moya Territoriya multicenter became the venue of an audiovisual performance topping off the special project’s Tobolsk-based public program brought into existence by Tyumen’s residents Konstantin Roslyakov, Evgeny Pisarchenko and Evgenia Provodenko.
The artists concocted an improvised audiovisual piece rife with synthesized honks, field audio recordings of urban life scenes, and a composite generative video sequence designed to immerse the audience in a world hidden from the view of a passerby. This element of the public program of the special project Create a New Layer was dedicated to sound art and generative art.
The Tobolsk-based special project of the Biennale blended together its exhibition and public programs. It opened on September 4 with the Invisible Touches installation by Ekaterina Sokolovskaya (St. Petersburg) and her sculpture master classes.
The project’s public program was packed with 11 events including lectures by Antonio Geuza (Moscow) and Lisa Savina (St. Petersburg) on the history of contemporary art and public art, workshops on making comics by Georgy Yelayev (Tyumen) and performance digs by Joshua Goode (USA).
The project’s public program also included a public art lab put on by a New York artist and art curator Kendal Henry. Over a course of four days, 16 artists from Tobolsk and Tyumen studied new methods of socially engaged art. The results of their efforts were showcased at the 16 Minutes Shop exhibition executed in the format of a presentation of unusual artefacts available for buying by any visitor willing to pay an unusual price such as a compliment, a hug, striking acquaintance with a stranger, replacing the artefact with one’s own find that will then have to be put back on display as well.
The most valuable feature of the Create a New Layer project is the conversation within the city’s art community and within regional art communities that it inspires. Through mediatorship, one could get to learn about the Biennale’s inner workings, get the feedback from the audience, understand what is important for the present-day art lovers and how they look at and perceive contemporary art. The tools designed to help one work with public art presented by the leading spokespersons of contemporary art as part of the public program can serve as a starting point for new local projects, Regina Nagumanova, an artist and mediator of the Invisible Touches installation, noted.
All events within the public and exhibition programs were aligned with the special project’s principle goals: to facilitate interaction between representatives of urban communities and experts, artists and curators from other regions and countries, promote residents’ contact with their environment and with each other, and to get them acquainted with contemporary art and its various forms.
The idea of the project was born after an online Instagram project called Create a New Layer. During the lockdown, I asked artists from different cities to create a project of their own in a digital format and send it in. Most of Moscow-based artists who took part in the online project created their artworks for the special project held in Tyumen. Then another idea came up for what to do in Tobolsk. The gist of the idea was to make the Create a New Layer project serve as a new cultural layer, not a digital one, that would be sensitive to the city’s local and historical context. Later on, we came up with the idea of an installation that projects a different understanding of reality and space underneath the top layer. We wanted to use this installation as a mechanism for launching the public program. In that sense the project that was created by the participants of the laboratory together with Kendal Henry is as important as the installation by Ekaterina Sokolovskaya, or as lectures and workshops and interactions between the artists from Tyumen and the artists from Tobolsk. All of these are integral parts of the Create a New Layer project, Alissa Sycheva, the special project’s curator, noted.
Our partnership with the Ural Biennale has enabled us to make a few more confident strides toward an entirely new level of culture and art. The event’s organizers have drawn the attention of leading Russian and international experts to Tobolsk as part of its diverse educational programs, helped expand creative horizons of its participants and spectators by introducing them to novel and more complex forms of art while promoting rediscovery of unique urban objects by local residents, Elena Belskaya, Head of ZapSibNeftekhim LLC’s Department of Government Relations and Social and Economic Projects, commented
The project is being implemented with the support of Tyumen Oblast’s Government, Tyumen Department of Culture, SIBUR and its social investment program, the Formula for Good Deeds, Tobolsk City Administration, and Tyumen State University with the active involvement of the Institute of Social and Humanitarian Sciences and SAS (School of Advanced Studies), Tyumen Museum and Education Association, Tyumen Oil and Gas Forum, the Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Foundation, CEC ArtsLink, and the Moya Territoriya multicenter.