In contrast to many of my other research trips for the Triennial, my visit to Nizhny Novgorod marked a return to a city that I have known and loved for a long time. It allowed me to see friends and engage in heartfelt conversations about everything on earth, including art. The unique milieu that has formed around the Nizhny Novgorod (now the “Volgo-Vyatka”) Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts, thanks to the efforts of Lyubov Saprykina and Anna Gor, eliminates once and for all the opposition between metropolitan and provincial and does away with the condescension with which one inevitably views everything taking place outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. The restored Arsenal, designed by Evgeny Asse, has three thousand square meters of exhibition space, a strong and well-balanced exhibition program, educational initiatives, and inclusive programs. It sets a rare precedent that shows it is possible to create an active organization working in a considered and systematic fashion in the domain of contemporary art, without the support of central institutions and resources. Daily heroism is also typical of artists living and working in Nizhny. This is one of the rare cases when one can (and should) speak about a city community of artists enthusiastically working within the local context and developing an artistic language of its own. None of the artists we met wanted to cast off the “provincial shackles” due to a lack of momentum, energy, or resources. The reason lies not only in the geographical proximity of Moscow but in the genius of Nizhny Novgorod and the powerful energy of social organization generated by the artists themselves.

Artem Filatov, whom we met early in the morning upon our arrival at the railroad station, is just such an organizer. He has already launched a host of new processes for consolidating city artists. Filatov began as a street artist, engaging in an enormous number of art partnerships and joint efforts (some will recall Artem Filatov and Vladimir Chernyshov’s work at the Fourth Biennale for Young Art at the Museum of Moscow). Several years ago, he founded the Nizhny Novgorod Festival of Street Art, which has legitimized this subcultural practice, as well as bringing it into the social space or, more precisely, the space of communication between the city’s inhabitants and contemporary artists. The main theme is Nizhny Novgorod’s historic wooden houses. The long-term, simmering conflict between local businesses and the federal government has led to dereliction, “accidental” demolitions and fires, not to mention the general dilapidation of buildings subject to modern urban wear and tear and deprived of elementary care and maintenance. With the help of art, Filatov has tried to attract the attention of city officials to the threatened buildings and, more importantly, to unite people living in these houses against bureaucratic arbitrariness. He has also attracted artists from other Russian regions to the project by creating new kinds of interactions. ZIP group from Krasnodar and Timofey Radya from Yekaterinburg, who took part in the street art festival, cooperated with local inhabitants to create not only individual objects such as wall paintings, but whole environments, re-establishing living human relationships through the stories of streets and houses. Art in Nizhny Novgorod has a strong social aspect.

Filatov was also responsible for the appearance of a cluster of artist studios in Nizhny. We visited it at the end of a three-hour walking tour of the highlights of local street art. The most active and prominent Nizhny Novgorod artists share these small studios. With over fifty projects to his name, Alexander Lavrov studies local material culture and the metamorphosis of the post-Soviet mentality in his objects, videos, and photos. Vladimir Chernyshov, an economics major, has embarked (with truly scientific meticulousness) upon a series of expeditions to northern Russia, travelling from village to village, collecting materials, and making delicate interventions in space.

The work of Nizhny Novgorod artists also points to the enormous potential of Russian land art, with its distinctive character and close attention to the Russian landscape, marked as it is by flatness and scarce vegetation. Andrei Druzhaev began his career as a street artist and then became interested in field studies, in the literal sense. He charred tree trunks, turning them into sculptures and arranging them along the forest edge, somewhat like Stonehenge. On another occasion, he burnt a strip of grass in the middle of a field, “injuring” the earth’s surface. The techniques of charring and burning (mostly wood) are used by virtually all Nizhny Novgorod artists. Filatov was intrigued by my observation, and we came up with a name for a new exhibition: Burn It! Continuing the burning theme, Andrei Olenev, undoubtedly the most prominent street artist in Nizhny on account of the size of his works and his excellent painterly technique, made a large-scale object for an exhibition at the private gallery Futuro: a huge well made of charred beams, which a priori cannot be used for its intended purpose.

We visited Egor of local street art duo TOY at home. They gained nationwide renown some time ago, and although they may not have appeared on Takashi Murakami’s Instagram like Nizhny artist Nikita Nomerz, their work—often based on subtle semiotic games—stand out from the rest. Ignoring the painterly potential of techniques and surfaces, they play on words and visual signs, adorning the city with strange pictograms. At one point, TOY (together with Andrei Olenev) were resident artists at Tolk Gallery, whose owner decided to give them a chance to exhibit their work regularly. However, it is apparently impossible to domesticate street art, or to limit it to museums, on account of its “otherness”: its value lies in its very fragility, inevitable death or disappearance and, at the same time, very rich and active life, in which city inhabitants participate in a strange and emotional fashion. Nizhny residents have, for instance, added leaves and flowers to Druzhaev’s branches and attached a thistle, drawn by Filatov, to a fence (slightly misarranging the image in the process).

For me, such human aspects embody the Nizhny Novgorod art scene. There is no other place in the world where I feel so much at home as in the Arsenal (where I saw the remarkable exhibition Living Alive, part of a trilogy conceived by curator Alisa Savitskaya), whiskey sour is nowhere so delicious, and there’s always someone ready to meet you, gather you up, show you around, and accompany you back.

Essay by Katya Inozemtseva

My trip to Kazan was planned long before Garage launched its regional program. The curators of the Smena Center for Contemporary Culture had invited me to give a talk on Moscow conceptualism. The existence of such a major self-organized initiative in a big city with a population of over a million—the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, sometimes called the “third capital of Russia”—promised an intense program of meetings with contemporary artists. In addition, Kazan is the birthplace of Russian video and media art: Bulat Galeyev’s studio and his Prometheus Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Aesthetics are well-known among those with an interest in Russian avant-garde culture. I was sure that my agenda would be packed and decided to set aside two days for visiting studios.

Founded in 2013, Smena is still financed by the artist Ilgizar Khasanov and his friends without any external public or private support. The center occupies the second floor and attic of a warehouse built in the early twentieth century. It consists of exhibitions rooms, a bookstore, and a hall for concerts, lectures, and literary performances. When I arrived at Smena, I was met by Ilgizar, his son Robert, and Kirill Maevsky. It’s impossible to say what Kirill, Robert and Ilgizar are responsible for individually. Together they support the center as if they were carrying a backpack on a fun yet difficult hiking trip. That was my impression, at least. They renovated the space themselves, taking out the rubbish, laying the floors, and building and painting the walls. They probably had assistants, whose names I don’t know, but I was struck (for the nth time) by the fact that some people are willing to invest their time and effort not in improving their personal surroundings at home, but into creating a comfortable space for themselves and others, and for contemporary art.

Ilgizar then took me to his studio, showing me the city on the way. Over the past decade, Kazan has had two major facelifts. The first took place in 2005, on the occasion of the city’s 1000th anniversary: old buildings in the city center were demolished, new buildings were constructed, and the subway opened. I was witness to this total reconstruction at the time: an excavator demolished the walls of an Art Nouveau building, which broke up into green flakes, while the elegant cast iron balcony refused to fall. Kazan’s second facelift took place fairly recently, on the occasion of the 2013 Summer Universiade. The last traces of the colorful but dilapidated neighborhoods in the historic center disappeared, to be replaced by sterile and comfortable streets and perfectly flat lawns on the embankment of the Bolaq Canal. Even the Lenin statue on Freedom Square looks bourgeois now. The sporting spirit is embodied by the newly-built stadia, while the contradictory nature of today’s prosperity is visible in the residential complex and administrative building of the Palace of Agriculture: a high-density development on the banks of the Kazanka River that resembles a Disney fan’s dream come true.

Ilgizar recalled with nostalgia old Kazan and the neighborhood where he grew up, even though it was, according to him, poor, uninviting, and sometimes even dangerous. His studio is located in a building that belongs to the Tatarstan Artists Union. It is quite small, yet seems to be a lot bigger on account of all the things stored there. These include not only paintings and objects, but also an incredible collection of odd items that are neatly piled up on the floor, window-sills, table, and shelves: tumbler dolls of different sizes and ages, whistles, pocket flashlights, Soviet Christmas tree decorations made of cardboard and cotton wool, wooden mashers, plastic figures from Kinder Surprise eggs, and lots of other wonderful things brought to life by their owner. All of this was mixed in equal proportions with brushes and tubes of paint. This, it seems, is an inevitable stage in the life of an artist who has outgrown the painterly tradition. It is no coincidence that the room reminded of the personal worlds of legendary Moscow nonconformist artists such as Dmitry Krasnopevtsev and Ivan Kuskov, who created magical universes in their small rooms/studios so as to combine life and art and give a third dimension to their painterly world.

The next studio I visited belonged to Rashid Tukhvatullin, who majored in physics and subsequently worked as a writer, translator, engineer, and artist. The aesthetic milieu was totally different here: the space didn’t resemble an artist’s studio in the least, but looked more like the workshop of a master jeweler or a super mechanic. Tukhvatullin uses small metalworking machines, pincers, and various other tools to create fantastic insects that he calls polynomials. They include a mosquito wearing a flight helmet in a cage, a dragonfly with a silver teaspoon instead of a tail, a fly with an abdomen made out of an apricot pit, a fly with lamps instead of eyes, a fly in rubber shoes, a fly on wheels, and complex assemblages of found objects. The fly is a subject which occupies many local artists. Ilya Kabakov has, without a doubt, cast his powerful shadow on the fly myth, yet this has not perturbed Ilgizar and Rashid in the least. Together with other Kazan artists, they have already held two exhibitions on the subject: Fly I and Fly II.

Close by was the studio of Viktor Timofeev, who is called “our Anatoly Zverev” in Kazan. I don’t know where this comparison came from. Timofeev’s lifestyle and outward appearance bear little resemblance to the legendary Moscow underground artist, and he works in a more rigid and naively schematic manner. The only possible similarity is his impetuous passion for painting, which is so organic that it has become a part of everyday life. Voluptuous red-haired beauties, cats, flowers, and bearded old men are repeating motifs in Timofeev’s small paintings and drawings, as well as in his book illustrations.

In the same building, we met Rustam Salikhov. He belongs to the generation of artists that stepped into the limelight in the late 1980s towards the end of perestroika. At that time, Soviet artists were in demand among Western art dealers, collectors, and curators, and the Soviet government had lifted all restrictions on the aesthetic and economic spheres. In such an environment, the abstract painter Salikhov discovered an artistic style of his own, as well as a group of fans and collectors. When we arrived, he calmly arranged his paintings in a row along the wall. Square and non-figurative, they employ a palette of earthen tones (black, brown, blue, and ochre) and serene rhythms of horizontal and vertical lines. Salikhov put a second row of pictures on top of the first, turning his compositions into one big, ornamental carpet.

The same day, I met several other artists. They were few in number and mostly showed me paintings. Paintings, paintings, and more paintings, as if they were the supreme form of visual art. These paintings were mostly figurative, and their styles and subject matter seemed to have become frozen in time—in the accepted metaphysics of “youth art.” Pensive girls with flowers, big-eyed human-like animals, and symbolic everyday scenes. A friend of mine coined a name for this type of artistic narrative: “angels with violins.” Another type of painting was ornamental abstract works that tickle viewers’ eyes rather than frightening them with their incomprehensibility.

Instead of spending another day looking at paintings in artists’ studios I returned to Smena Center for Contemporary Culture, where I spoke with local art historians, critics, and journalists. These conversations showed that the city’s art scene is stagnating rather than developing. The local Artists Union retains its former influence, especially in the economic and administrative spheres, and controls the exhibition activities of city and republican art institutions as well as the curriculum at local educational establishments. The conservatism of senior members of the Union of Artists, who have power and control money, is predictable. A lot more surprising are the retrograde and even reactionary views of young graduates of art institutes, who consider Andy Warhol’s Pop Art to be nothing but kitsch and a slap in the face of public taste.

This paradox is all the more remarkable given that Kazan is a university town with an educated, progressive, and refined population. By the way, the Smena is popular not only on account of its exhibitions, but also because of its excellent bookstore. The Center’s lectures on architecture, cinema, contemporary photography, feminist criticism, philosophy, urban studies, and literary theory draw crowds. Nonetheless, the local art scene is still and stagnating. Almost all the artists I spoke with are middle-aged. However, their entourage consists of young intellectuals aged 30 and under. They make up a living cultural environment in which a new generation of artists ready for freedom may well appear.

Essay by Sasha Obukhova