Rostov-on-Don has multicultural roots dating back to a Greek settlement that was situated on the city’s current site and whose influence is still felt in the local Greek community. In the 1920s, the neighboring town of Nakhichevan-on-Don was merged with the city, later becoming the Proletarsky City District. This was the time when Soviet architects were experimenting with house-communes, including a gigantic, 22-entrance residential house for the Rostov Electric Locomotive Repair Plant. Members of the intelligentsia were also settled in these houses in order to teach the children of workers, turning the Proletarsky District into a cultural center of sorts. The effects of this policy are felt to this day: for example, the members rap group Kasta, who cultivate an image based on Rostov’s reputation as the criminal capital of Southern Russia, come from the families of university professors and researchers.

Contemporary art emerged in Rostov in the second half of the 1960s, with the appearance of the first nonconformist artists such as Alexander Zhdanov. In the second half of the 1970s, conceptualist practices began to emerge, for example Alexander Stadnik’s action Brother 1976. Subsequently, the work of many contemporary Rostov artists is esoteric. One of the key local figures is Vadim Murin, a well-established painter with a mystical perspective. In 2012, a major retrospective of his work entitled Chronology: Homage to Christopher Columbus was held at the Museum of Modern Fine Art on Dmitrovskaya. In addition to painting, Murin gives lectures on the history of contemporary art.

Alexander Lishnevsky is a prominent artist of the older generation. He studied together with the artists that later made up the group Art or Death—including Valery Koshlyakov, Alexander Sigutin, Avdei Ter-Oganyan, Yuri Shabelnikov—but does not share their views. He believes that contemporary art has been in decline since Salvador Dali’s day. He lectures at the Academy of Architecture and Arts of the Southern Federal University, where he is an associate professor in the Department of Design. He has taught many artists, including Vadim Murin. In 2010, Lishnevsky was the commissar of the first and (only) South Russian Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Young artists gather around the MAKARONKA art center, which is supported by the DON Contemporary Art Foundation. The foundation was established in 2014 by Evgeny Samoylov, who previously founded the commercial art gallery 16th Line. However, he soon realized that it was necessary to develop the local art scene to sell contemporary art. To this end, he drew up a list of young Rostov artists to whom he offered support, as well as launching a publishing program. The foundation’s publications include The 2000s (2016, a book about contemporary figures on the Rostov art scene; the disc K8 and the cassettes Monochrome Rainbow for Tape, and Solemn by the artist and experimental musician Alexander Selivanov. The foundation shows large-scale non-commercial exhibitions, including Sergei Sapozhnikov’s solo project The Drama Machine (2016, organized with the support of Gazprom Private Banking. MAKARONKA houses еру Theater 18+, directed by Yuri Muravitsky, and the creative laboratory Turnichki, founded in the spring of 2013 by curator Leyly Aslanova, artist Daniil Epifanov, and the art group SITO. The laboratory aims to develop the local art community through exhibitions, performances, lectures, and discussions. SITO (headed by Dmitry Tsupko) is known for actions during which artists installed their paintings on the streets, provoking criticism both from conservative academic circles (“a lack of respect for artists’ work”) and from contemporary Rostov artists (“a poorly developed relationship with viewers”.) Regular participants in MAKARONKA exhibitions include Irina Grabkova, Aleksei Eroshenko, Marianna Shprayzer, Daniil Epifanov, Tanya Glama, Stas Ekimenko, Vadim Murin, Albert Pogorelkin, Alexey Khamov, Masha Bogoraz, Inna Fedorova, Elena Lapko, Alexander Selivanov, and the art group Belka & Strelka.

Young Rostov artists also work actively with the Typography Art Center in nearby Krasnodar and the Krasnodar Institute for Contemporary Art. Some of them studied at Moscow’s contemporary art schools: Leyly Aslanova was a student at Base Institute, Irina Grabkova graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art, and Oleg Ustinov studied at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia. Many of the artists live between Rostov and Moscow.

Volgograd has a long history. The city appeared on the Volga trade route that emerged in the tenth century. According to local inhabitants, Volgograd still lives in the past. Some believe that it would be better for the city to be called Tsaritsyn (its name before 1925), while others prefer Stalingrad (as it was called until 1961). Volgograd is a “hero city,” and people came from all over the Soviet Union to rebuild it after the war. The old city infrastructure is disintegrating today, and no new infrastructure is being built to replace it. This is also true of the art scene. From an early age, the younger generation aspires to leave the city.

For a long time, the regional art situation was determined by structures inherited from the Soviet period: the Artists and Architects Unions and museums of socialist realist art. Although contemporary art appeared in the city in the mid-1980s, it continued to be an underground movement almost until the end of the 2000s. The only exception involved artists who left Volgograd and made a name for themselves in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or abroad, such as Oleg Mavromatti, who lives in the US; Vladimir Potapov, who has moved to Moscow; and Peter Dzogaba, who lives mainly in Berlin, but maintains ties with his hometown. The situation began to change in 2011 and 2012. The Festival of Young and Contemporary Artists has been held three times at the Gorky District Library. Even the provincial, conservative Mashkov Museum of Fine Arts began to organize events such as Anton Valkovsky’s talk about the results of his archive research project “Avant-City: Volgograd Art between Performance and Video (1986–2005).” The 28 Youth and Art Center, which worked with contemporary artists, existed from 2012 to 2016. Trapezium, the first contemporary art gallery in the city, opened in 2013 and functioned for two years. In 2012, the exhibition space of the Mashkov Museum was closed for repair for an indefinite period. A group of artists who had actively exhibited there made protest action entitled Stalker at the museum. One of the items displayed during the action was an installation by Tamara Nechaeva (Shipitsina), which included an image of an aborted foetus—a metaphor for the state of art in Volgograd.

Today, there are no platforms specializing in contemporary art in Volgograd. Many artists are forced to exhibit their work in other Russian cities such as Saratov and Moscow, or abroad.

Anton Valkovsky, mentioned above, is a scholar and curator who has organized exhibitions by Volgograd artists, including graphic artists Stanislav Azarov and Alexei Shilov, and the sculptor Dmitry Zimin. When he was appointed director of the Volgograd Regional Agency of Cultural Initiatives in 2016, Valkovsky set himself the goal of nurturing a new generation of contemporary artists in the city. He managed to bring together over 40 artists, urban designers, curators, musicians, and project managers. Every year they hold the ten-day art festival (Re)Inventing the Public that takes place in abandoned city spaces and involves the local community in its work.

The city of Krasnodar, situated on the right bank of the Kuban River, has the relaxed atmosphere of a resort, although it is more than 100km from the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. In contrast to Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar is fairly conservative: there have been cases of Cossacks and Orthodox Christian activists disrupting cultural events.

Nevertheless, an independent alternative art scene is emerging in the city. The history of contemporary art in Krasnodar began with the exhibition Façade (1994), the first experimental show to be held in a semi-abandoned wing of the F.A. Kovalenko Art Museum. The artists Vladimir Migachev and Vladimir Kolesnikov actively participated in educating the younger generation (Kolesnikov worked for a long time with Moscow’s Aidan Gallery, which is now closed). In 2008, they organized the exhibition Revision, where they showed new Krasnodar art. The process of active artistic self-organization began at around the same time: artists occupied abandoned buildings and held events there. In 2009, ZIP group appeared; its name derives from the Factory of Measuring Instruments (Zavod Izmiritelnykh Priborov), where they held their first exhibitions. In 2011, ZIP group organized the Krasnodar Contemporary Art Institute (KISI) in their studio. The institute holds exhibitions, as well as delivering educational programs.

The Typography Cultural Center, situated in a former print shop in the city center, was founded in 2012 by the artists of ZIP group and the collector Nikolai Moroz. They were subsequently joined by businessman Evgeny Rudenko, who is currently the project’s main sponsor. Typography has allocated premises to KISI and opened an artist residency, RedGift gallery, art classes for children and adults, several cinema clubs, and business spaces. Today, Typography is drawing the city’s leading artists and systematically driving the development of contemporary art in the region by building horizontal ties with other cities such as Rostov-on-Don, Voronezh, Sochi, Lipetsk, Makhachkala, Samara, and Nizhny Novgorod. It also works with Russian and Western organizations and exhibits the work of local artists such as Valery and Yulia Kazas, Vladimir Kolesnikov, Ivan Dubyaga, Viktor Linsky, Vladimir Omutov, Denis Uranov, Ludmila Baronina, and Tina Vasyanina.

The PhotoVisa International Festival has been held annually since 2013, attracting contemporary photographers from all over the world. Since 2014, the contemporary art auction MOST has taken place in Krasnodar, shaping the local art market and drawing artists and specialists from all over Russia. In 2016, Krasnodar artist Mikhail Smaglyuk, known for his kinetic sculptures and performances, opened Glyuk Gallery to exhibit his own installations and the work of other artists. Krasnodar is also home to Larina Gallery, which exhibits both traditional artists and contemporary artists of the older generation.

Essay by Tatiana Volkova

I went to Crimea with mixed feelings. The political events of 2014 that led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea split my inner circle in two: friends and family quarreled, taking opposing political stances. My personal territory was transformed into isolated warring “islands” of Atlantists and Eurasians, Slavophiles and Westernizers, Russian “chauvinists” and Ukrainian “patriots.” From the start, I sided with those who supported European democratic values and rejected heavy-handed geopolitical methods. I didn’t want to go to Crimea, where I would feel like an invader in a foreign country.

Or in my own country? However, thinking along these lines would mean joining those who believe that the annexation of Crimea was justified. Still, curiosity is hard to overcome. It was interesting, after all, to take a look at the art scene in this legendary place that is a magnet for people that I greatly respect and admire. Having been a cult territory for Moscow conceptual artists, Crimea ceased producing anything noteworthy in the field of art during the last years of the Soviet regime and after its collapse, when the region became part of independent Ukraine. Who is there now? What is going on?

In a word, I was heading for “The Island of Crimea,” to quote the title of Vassily Aksyonov’s 1981 novel. Crimea had been a battleground of geopolitical forces for centuries, a cultural Mecca for the Soviet intelligentsia, and terra incognita during the post-Soviet period. I was lucky that the curator and art historian Maria Udovydchenko, my friend and former colleague at the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Moscow, had moved to Crimea a short time before, settling in the astronomers’ village of Nauchny. She was my guide to the Crimean contemporary art scene.

Simferopol is clean, busy, and full of people and cars. The sea is not visible here, and the dry southern air is suffused with the smells of the steppe that are so unfamiliar for a Moscow inhabitant. Although Russian is spoken everywhere, the street names and road signs are in three different languages—Russian, Ukrainian, and Tatar. I was staying at the Ukraine Hotel, which I took to be a good sign.

Maria has been working as a curator during her time in Crimea. She has organized contemporary art exhibitions and festivals, given lectures on the history of the avant-garde in the republic’s two art museums in Simferopol and Sevastopol, and, in 2012, founded the ArtPlatz international art residency at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory. She has done everything she can to resuscitate the local contemporary art scene.

The community of non-traditional artists is extremely small and disconnected in Simferopol, and institutional exhibition spaces do not exist. The eternally powerful local Union of Artists has occupied all available exhibition spaces, gradually degenerating into an institution catering to the needs of beach vacationers exclusively interested in small Crimean landscapes. I saw a strange exhibition of contemporary art in the night club Frigate. Its participants had evidently heard about non-traditional art, but didn’t know what to do with their knowledge. I saw another exhibition at the club Kultprosvet, whose owner, Dmitry Zaremblyuk, gives lessons to beginning DJs as well as showing fashionable commercial art: local exhibitors knowtheir audience.

All of these are private initiatives: neither the city exhibition halls nor the museums have any desire to become contemporary art centers. In Crimea there isn't a single institution, whether public, non-commercial, or private, that supports contemporary artists.

We were joined there by Anton Trofimov, the artist whose work we had seen at Frigate. This young intellectual is a photographer, historian, regional scholar, and teacher. For several years, he organized Monstration in Simferopol, but stopped after 2014. He showed me a video of his last “showing” that took place during the first “Russian” spring in Crimea, and it was immediately clear to me why such events won’t be repeated anytime soon in Simferopol: such a unanimous public outcry against art activists has not been seen in any Russian city, as far as I know.

The political agenda, the impact of international sanctions, and the problems of cultural self-identity seem not to worry those local artists who have chosen to stay in Crimea. Everybody is irritated by the incessant propaganda, but the change of national status does not seem to have led to any serious ethical reflections. One gets the feeling that people were so stunned by the sudden external developments that they decided to postpone passing their personal verdict on the status of the peninsula for later, somewhat like Scarlett O’Hara, who decided to “think about that tomorrow.” They are quite upbeat today: yes, it’s difficult to change your orientation from one metropolis to another—to look to Moscow rather than Kiev—but a new external energy has appeared, and there’s no more reason to think that you’re the boondocks of a post-Soviet country that systematically ignores this controversial territory in its economic and cultural policies.

Crimeans have long been used to difficult living conditions and periodic power outages. The weak art market and the lack of governmental and public support for contemporary art have also become familiar. Nevertheless, they tend to be more concerned by the scarcity of information and the immaturity of the professional art community: local contemporary artists are mostly united by their opposition to the system rather than by their aesthetic tastes.

A new platform has begun to bring contemporary artists together: the Yuzhny Sanatorium in the village of Nikolaevka, where Maria Udovydchenko has held the Art Coast Festival since 2013, with the support of the local administration. The festival has served as an alternative to plein air sessions, a popular form of artistic collaboration in Crimea. During the Art Coast Festival, artists live and work together, engage in discussions, attend lectures, and exchange experience. The festival ends with an exhibition that takes place in an exotic setting—on the tiled bottom of an empty swimming pool. Each year, the festival has a different theme: in 2015 it was “Art Inside and Outside.” The walls of the sanatorium buildings and auxiliary structures are decorated with work by local and visiting street artists, both Russian and Ukrainian. In the guest rooms, there are drawings and paintings made by festival artists.

Our meeting with Andrei Orlov, the chief ideologist of the Crimea’s painters, uncovered a paradox characteristic of both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods: the striving to be both “contemporary” and “classical,” or an artist who would be admired both by the titans of the Renaissance and the heroes of post-Cézanne “modernist easel painting.” Painting is considered to be “real art,” while everything else is nothing but buffoonery. My discussion with Andrei about “tradition and innovation” ended with a (temporary) ceasefire, but I was astonished by the conservatism of his views.

The conservatism of the artistic community itself only increased when I moved from Simferopol to Sevastopol. This city with a heroic military past is the symbol and ideological bulwark of “Russian Crimea.” It combines the relaxed atmosphere of a seaside resort with the proud self-sufficiency of a military fortress.

The pathos of the memory of “military glory” and the disdain for “worldly glory” was evident in my conversation with one of the leading Sevastopol artists of the middle generation, Alexander Shumtsov or Arush Votsmush, as he prefers to call himself. He lives with his wife, the artist Darya Rybina, in a small, cozy house with a ginger cat, nineteenth-century furniture, and salon watercolors on the walls. Arush said something quite significant: “Just think about it. Why do we need all this fuss, all these biennials and Documentas of yours? We’ve got everything we need: art, friends, sea, sun, and good, cheap wine.” Why, indeed? You can see the artist’s insouciance in his drawings and his original “fortune-telling” albums, and hear it in his commentary on political events. “What’s the use of worrying about something you can’t change? It’s like a transplant: you amputate something in one place and sew it onto another. The process is painful and difficult, but the wound will heal.”

That evening, I met with a large group of Sevastopol artists on the second floor of a fashionable boutique on one of the city’s central streets. The idea and layout of this space was conceived by the street artist and designer Aleksei Kislov. He aimed to unite commerce and entertainment: after shopping, you can get a good cup of coffee and spend time in a fun and productive way in a small room for film screenings and lectures. This space represents yet another attempt to go beyond material things and cater to people’s appetite for knowledge and communication.

During our meeting, the artists recalled past initiatives that seemed promising at first, yet did not result in anything: the festival Neon Flippers, the online magazine Bric-a-Brac, and many more. But why hasn’t any initiative led to qualitative improvements and why does one still have to convince cultural managers, ordinary viewers, and even fellow artists that art is not just oil paintings, but also actions, installations, and objects? Some cited the lack of public interest and financial support, while others mentioned human fatigue: one gets tired of working without any visible results. One kept returning to the question of how to change the situation so that artists would not have to leave Crimea to make careers in Kiev, Moscow, Berlin, or Hong Kong. The artists that have chosen to stay are deeply attached to their native region, yet differ on ways of promoting its development. Some are waiting for external support and have a fantasy that one day there might be the opening of a Crimean branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, while others believe that only local initiatives can help.

The next evening, the exhibition-action Cultural Code: Unspontaneous Generation was held in the inner courtyard of the Central Tauride Museum as part of Museum Night. Proposed by Maria Udovydchenko, the idea was supported by the artists at their own risk. They were inspired by the atmosphere of the cult movie Assa (1987) and the spirit of freedom that marks the work of Sergey Kuryokhin and the New Leningrad Artists. The event was based on the idea of a “work in progress,” a spontaneous art action that develops before viewers’ eyes. For many artists, this was their first experience of going beyond the limits of painting, a practice that is considered sovereign in the artistic tradition.

Alexander Yushko, director of the Shchyolkino Theater Center, put his experience of classical theater aside to create a performance based on texts from a book about Timur Novikov called When You Lie, Tell Only the Truth. Vitaly Marakhovsky invited participants of the action Let’s Build Crimea Together to fill in the map of the peninsula with Styrofoam geometric figures, putting them in their favorite places. The street artists Viktor Nefyodov and Oleg Fedotov felt quite at home working with the wall. Igor Kim refused to depict anything on the surface at all. He silently approached visitors and, without uttering a word, wrote questions about the images and meanings associated with their childhood on pieces of paper. Perplexed viewers, smiling and also silent, wrote their replies on pieces of colored paper that they attached to a large table made of fiberboard. By the end of the evening, the table was festively decorated with a rustling, multicolored quilt that evoked dreams and good omens.

My trip to Crimea was accompanied by dreams and good omens, and the incredibly bright, inspiring hope that everything will turn out okay. At the end, Anton Trofimov, who lives in Simferopol, wrote me with me three questions: “Did you like it in Crimea? Is it very “occupied”? Or can one live there?”

Essay by Sasha Obukhova