Curators O. Budulak, L. Ryzhova
Barnaul is a single-industry town built by the founding fathers of Russian industry, the Demidovs. And like all industrial cities, in the process of decolonization and the era of great changes, it suffered great social changes: resources ran out, people left, the city burned down. But the city rebuilt, the “match” arrived, and the inhabitants multiplied exponentially. Until the very end of the 20th century. Today Barnaul is a city of closed factories, the capital of academic drawing, a stop until eternal youth in the Altai Republic. The focus of the exhibition is aimed at a person within modern systems of relations — economic, natural, technological, gender, social, information. And the artists capture those moments that are usually called “system failure”, or, as in economic theory, “the human factor. The exhibition raises questions about what happened to the city and the person after the industry, after academic achievements, after the person. The key problems of artistic works are the problems of society and philosophy that developed from the post-war world: emancipation and feminization, production and the industrial revolution, liberation and loss of corporality, loss of boundaries between the material and digital, the existence of the post-anthropocene, deconstruction and the search for a new one, miracles and contradictions. The exhibition brought together young artists from Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk and Tyumen, defined as unofficial or contemporary art. Here is a list of accidents that seem to be the new order. In the time of Pushkin, 90 percent of the money (silver coins) for the entire Russian Empire was produced in Barnaul with a population of ten thousand people. Shortly before her 119th birthday, Polina Skugareva died of the flu — we don’t know what kind of rolls and cakes were in her notebook of recipes, but she saw too much, from Nikolai to Putin, too much. In 2012, the people of Barnaul turned the rally into soft toys. In 2022, there are a large number of contemporary artists in Barnaul who are marginalized and not included in the official community.
