The curator and friend of the gallery, Alexander Dashevsky, will gather works from various authors around several themes («Teacher, Double, Monkey» «This is country house!» «Garden vs. City») to create a unique space that serves as a cache-theater-storage. In this space, the artworks will interact with the audience and each other, reflecting on the 25th anniversary of the gallery and the shifts in fashion, paradigms, generations, and cultural orientations over a quarter of a century.
The project «The River of Time Does Not Tolerate Ice» is a series of exhibitions exploring the questions that art in a commercial gallery addresses (has addressed and may address), how it is presented, and the relationships it enters when crossing the gallery threshold in one direction or another. It examines how perceptions of what is fashionable, solid, expensive, prestigious, modern, daring, and permissible change. It discusses how the beam of fame and demand wanders among artists, how oblivion gives way to demand, and how annoying irrelevant clutter can become invaluable heritage within months. It also considers how artworks whisper to each other in the darkness of the gallery's storage.
The project is structured in three iterations, within which the curator assembles three different narratives in the exhibition space using works from approximately the same list of artists.
The first assembly is titled «Teacher, Double, Monkey» It is dedicated to collectors, connoisseurs, and viewers who seek reflections of their own personality traits, inner movements, states, and thoughts in art. The exhibition is organized as pairs, trios, or rows of works by different authors that are similar or correspond with each other. Correspondence can be based on themes, plastic solutions, concepts, modes of engagement with the viewer, and other logics. Similarities and differences alter not only the context and perception of works that enter into a relationship of duplicity but also illustrate how images migrate within an era, how artists find themselves in a position of cultural inheritance without knowing their «ancestor» and how the next decade continues and develops approaches rejected in the previous one.
The second assembly — «This is my country house!» A candid conversation about art in interiors and interiors in art. About those who buy art to live with it, those who create art for others to live with, and those who are categorically against it! A painting above the sofa, an object on the rug by the fireplace, an installation in the bathroom, a video in the flowerbed — is it a guilty pleasure, the end of the journey, or a temporary stop on the way to the museum?
The final exhibition, titled «Garden vs. City» explores instances where art is collected to make a statement orbi et urbi (to the world and the city), to change both people and the surrounding world. It delves into the idea of a collection as a statement addressed to an undefined audience, created by those for whom collecting is a form of expression.
Alexander Dashevsky is a Russian artist, curator, and art historian. He is a co-founder of the independent experimental exhibition space «The Non-State Non-Russian Museum» («NeNeMu») in St. Petersburg.
