In one of the first conversations of my trip through the region, the Omsk artist Dimas Virge told me a story about Salvador Dali explaining why artists could not exist in Siberia: “When everything around you is white, you see only purple.” For a time, Virge consistently used purple in his work, but later advised his students against doing so.

This episode shows the importance of the notion of “whiteness” that constantly arose in my conversations with Siberian artists—not always explicitly, but somewhat like an omnipresent demon that takes possession of your body and soul in the course of the long winter months. This “demon” determines the region’s specific aesthetics, whose garishness recalls pop art (the artist Vyacheslav Mizin calls it Siberian ironic conceptualism). The harsh climate and vast expanses have contributed to the emergence of a special conceptual framework that transmits the artists’ sensation of their own Siberianness.

Although Novosibirsk is the region’s biggest city, Omsk and Krasnoyarsk are considered by locals to be more lively. Each city has a distinctive genius loci that shapes its cultural life. It may be embodied in the figure of a person—a charismatic “genius” who creates a community of artists and contributes to cultural life in general—or a local museum or artist-run space.

Omsk was the first city on my itinerary. It is an old city with a three-hundred-year history. During my visit, Omsk was feverishly preparing to celebrate its jubilee. Local artist Damir Muratov gave me the names of several artists and the address of a mysterious art space/community called MOKH.

Over the next few days, we kept returning to this space, which was founded by a collector called Dima (I never learned his last name). He constantly provides support to artists from the region, organizing exhibitions, putting them up when they come to Omsk, and financing the creation of new works. I met there, among others, the members of the young art group Nadenka—four young female graduates of the School for Engaged Art founded by the Chto Delat collective in St. Petersburg (where many Omsk artists have relocated to). Dima was very hospitable, yet initially wary of the “Moscow inspector,” who had come to a city where “nothing was going on,” as he kept telling me. After carefully enquiring into the reasons for my visit he was reassured, and MOKH’s doors were open to me from then on.

I was told about several galleries that had existed in Omsk and then closed after “the money ran out.” Along with the words “and they left the city,” this phrase figured in many stories. Local journalist, artist, and curator Alexander Rumyantsev introduced me to the director of the Omsk Regional Museum of Fine Arts, who told me about gradual improvements in the museum’s policy of acquiring works by contemporary artists, and about cooperation with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg regarding opening a space devoted to contemporary art. Although these plans have been put on hold for now, local artists eagerly await their implementation, hoping this will inject new life into the local art scene. Rumyantsev organized several impromptu meetings with artists, during which I met Flox Contemporary Dance Group, whose two members told me a lot about what was going on in the region and about the group’s educational mission.

One of the most memorable events of my trip to Omsk was undoubtedly my visit to the studio of Damir Muratov, the artist responsible for the now famous work United States of Siberia (2012). Virtually all the artists I talked to had mentioned his name with smiles and compliments. It was as if they were speaking about a local priest. Muratov was not in the city at the time, but his wife Natasha, who works at the Museum of Fine Arts, showed me their house and his studio. Located at the edge of the city, the house and garden have been transformed into a magical world with the help of bright colors, symbols, and texts.

My visit ended with a long conversation with another titan of the local art scene, Dimas Virge. His parting words were, “Now you can be my delegate.”

After taking the night train on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I arrived early in the morning in a much younger city. Novosibirsk immediately gives the impression of a megalopolis—it is one of the biggest cities in Russia.

My encounter with one of the region’s most politicized artists, Konstantin Eremenko, convinced me that in the absence of historical landmarks and myths in this relatively young city, an artist must create them on their own. Eremenko has made a series of comic-like paintings about the life of the eccentric Siberian separatist Lykov. The series is funny and incisive in its depiction of the current historical moment.

In conversation with young artist Mayana Nasybullova, I was surprised to learn about the major impact the local press has on art. Mayana organized an exhibition called Artistic Porno (2015) that provoked a scandal long before it opened. As a result, the participants altered the exhibition for the preview, incorporating reproductions of classical nudes in order to assuage the press. As soon as the preview was over, they restored the exhibition to its original form. Accordingly, media commentaries and those of “initiated” viewers differed radically.

Full of impressions, I proceeded to my next destination.

Located northwest of Novosibirsk, Tomsk is a famous university town whose fortunes began to decline at the end of the nineteenth century, when the newly constructed Trans-Siberian Railway bypassed it 200km to the south. Nevertheless, the first museum of Slavic mythology opened here, and a branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts was founded in 2013 under the directorship of artist Vyacheslav Mizin, a member of Blue Noses group. The city’s cultural life centers around NCCA and several festivals of experimental music that are held in industrial cities around Tomsk. Cultural life is not very dynamic, but locals are pinning their hopes on NCCA’s projected move to a new and larger space, which, however, is still up in the air.

I was told from the start that Krasnoyarsk is the third Russian city (after Moscow and St. Petersburg) where one can receive a complete art education, including graduate studies. This explains why there are so many Krasnoyarsk natives among contemporary Russian artists (some of them have moved to Moscow) and why the level of exhibitions and theoretical work published here is so high. The most prominent Krasnoyarsk artists are the provocateur Vladimir Slonov and the painter Alexander Surikov. Slonov became famous for his Sochi series of paintings (2013), which wittily parodied the Sochi Winter Olympics. Surikov presents himself as a poet and neo-futurist, whose aesthetic is completely different to Slonov’s. The city is home to the Krasnoyarsk Museum Center, and the Vladimir Potanin Foundation supports the majority of local cultural projects. Many people fear that it will cease financing projects, but hopefully, this will not happen in the near future. Since 1995, the Krasnoyarsk Museum Center has hosted the first Museum Biennale in Russia, which draws artists from all over the country. The Krasnoyarsk Book Culture Fair (KrYaKK) has also been held in the city since 2006.

My meetings with young artists led to long strolls through the city and conversations on park benches. For them, the urban space serves as a source of inspiration and offers an appropriate and accessible medium. This is apparently the reason why many of them choose to engage in public and street art. I came away with a new understanding of what I had seen in the region’s other cities, and in particular, why street art plays such an important role in the cultural life of cities with a lack of institutions and other kinds of support—this situation leads to original forms of interaction between art and viewers.