Today PARAZIT is one of the brightest creative initiatives in St. Petersburg. This is a kind of creative laboratory, where there is a mutually beneficial exchange of skills and experience with youthful energy. With the main unchanged composition of the group, every year a large number of young talents pass through it, the brightest and most talented works remain in the association.
An unusual gallery has been operating in St. Petersburg for almost eleven years continuously, without an official address, employees, or curators, and without a firm artistic policy. This is the PARAZIT gallery, created with the object of existing on “the body” of various cultural institutions in the city, and now firmly settled in the corridor of the famous Petersburg gallery Borey.
The idea of artistic parasitism was first brought to life in 2000 by participants of the “New Dummies Society”, Vadim Flyagin and Vladimir Kozin. The history of today’s Parazit started when this idea was resuscitated in 2004 by the artists Vladimir Kozin, Yuriy Nikiforov and Igor Mezheritsk, the leaders of three well-known artistic groups that were no longer existent at the time.
It should be noted that the Parazit gallery’s group consists of artists who are absolutely different in their directions and techniques. An important point is the absence of a curator figure or any other sort of administrator – all decisions are made exclusively by a group conference of the artists. The gallery’s set of artists changes from time to time; someone has left the ranks, and someone has joined. A distinctive “youth group” has formed within the gallery. It is revealing that the age difference between the youngest and oldest members of the group is 40 years. Such democratic representation is unusual in the Petersburg art environment, where a generation of artists often withdraws into itself.
Essentially, the Parazit gallery is a free association of artists who have found a permanent exhibition space in the Borea hallway, which has not imposed any obligations on their individual projects.
From time to time, the Parazit artists emerge from their corridor and put together large joint exhibitions in Borey’s main halls or in other galleries in the city.
Members of the unification:
- Aleksandr Shishkin-Hokusay
- Aleksandr Strokov
- Alena Tereshko
- Alexander Morozov
- Alina Khalitova
- Andrey Kabo
- Andrey Sikorskiy
- Anna Ivonina
- Dmitriy Zheravov
- Emilia Sangi
- Gerasim Kuznetsov
- Greta Dimaris
- Igor Panin
- Igor Plotnikov
- Ivan Smirnov
- Karozich group
- Kerim Ragimov
- Kolya Sadovnik
- Lucas Shvetsov
- Maria Grabareva
- Natali Feofilova-Feting
- Natalia Grazhdankina
- Olga Rostrosta
- Petr Shvetsov
- Sasha Gleizer
- Semyon Motolyanets
- Tatiana Dubovskaya
- Tatyana Pole
- Timur Musaev-Kagan
- Vera Svetlova
- Vladimir Kozin
- Vladimir Lilo