HangART-7 Edition 5 “Russia fly by”

The aim of the HangART-7 arts programme is continually to promote young talents and their careers. After the focus on the city of New York the theme of the next HangART-7 exhibition is Russia, a country in which not only artists and the art market are experiencing deep-going structural changes.

For decades many of the art producers found themselves in opposition to official culture and were largely excluded from public life. A block was put on contacts with the international arts market. But now artists are increasingly tackling the mechanisms of the market. Not only does the Art Moscow arts fair, which has existed for 10 years, bear witness to this but so does the newly founded Moscow Biennale, which opens for the second time in January 2007. Even official policy is gradually recognising art as an added value, which can be “part of a political approach to the renewal of the country”, and is promoting large events with an international impact; but the constantly changing conditions of everyday life mean that artists still find it difficult to develop an appropriate position and achieve international visibility.

Alongside the biennales and art fairs, it is primarily private activity that is shaping Russian art life today. The Moscow ERA Foundation, established by Elena Berezkina is one of these initiatives, whose director Asya Silaeva has been commissioned as one of three curators for the HangART-7 project. An artist and photographer from St Petersburg, Dimitry Pilikin will trawl through the St Petersburg scene to select various painting positions for Salzburg, and as the third in the group of curators Ludmilla Ivashina from Novosibirsk has been invited to choose artists from the city almost 3.000 km from Moscow.

For the Russia project, as in earlier exhibitions, HangART-7 is concentrating on figurative painting, for which it is a matter of discovering the latest and most exciting positions.

Participating artists:
Marina Alexeeva
Sergey Bespamjatnykh
Sergey Denisov
Diana Machulina
Aleksandr Pogorzhelski
Vitaly Pushnitskiy
Dimitry Shorin