the project is supported by SPIN
Supporting Principal Investigators 2024
Alexey Korneev
Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan
March-April '22
Georgia
May-October '22
Thailand
October'22 - January'23
Indonesia
January - April'23
Thailand
May-September'23
Serbia
September'23 - ..
art manager, curator, co-founder of the Moscow gallery "Adept", founder of the international art association NO W Foundation. From the beginning of spring 2022 to the present, he has been traveling to different countries, implementing various anti-war and humanistic initiatives.
Another author, or perhaps these are the authors – you can guess – remain in Russia and therefore do not want their names to be announced in the public domain.
The format of the works is digital art/prints.
The creation of a series of works, initially inspired by the words of the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov that the war is supported by "an absolute minority of Russians", was started back in March 2022. As the project developed, the issues covered by the works gradually became broader, covering various social problems of the country. The visual language created by the authors is suitable for highlighting a whole layer of sins of Russian society that appeared long before February 24 - first of all, its all-consuming indifference, and random shoots of humanity that were not crushed by the huge letter Z.
The works are based on wartime photographs of Moscow, created by anonymous artists who are still in Russia, in collaboration with curator Alexey Korneev. The entire series is dedicated to people who were unable to leave the territory of the Russian Federation and continue to resist, surrounded by those who prefer to close their eyes to the ongoing tragedy and are busy with their own affairs.
The works are a reflection of the terrible feeling that never leaves the authors in Moscow: when you go out into the street, an apocalypse is happening in your world, and people go about their business absolutely calmly, as if there is no war and nothing has happened. This feeling is close to many people - to see in their fellow citizens an indifferent crowd of people who still have the opportunity to "live their own lives", and themselves feel loneliness and acute dissent.
In the project, this is presented in the form of gray zombie men, but we do not know how many of them experience the same thing - so each gray man may turn out to be colored. Loneliness and detachment from others, which the most conscious of citizens feel, is one of the scars that this war and this regime left on Russian society.
At the same time, there are "villains" among the colored people. In the works, this is primarily a marker of a consciously transmitted position and, according to the authors, many Russian security officials understand perfectly well that they are doing terrible things and this is their choice, because there are no orders that cannot be ignored.
"In order for the works to correspond to their message, I collaborated with artists who are still in Moscow, who took photographs that became the basis of the works - they show the capital in spring, already wartime. The files were transferred in strict secrecy, it was already clear that dissent of any format is very dangerous, for example, in the case of Sasha Skochilenko. Despite the fact that the original idea was strictly anti-war, we realized that the visual language we created is suitable for highlighting a whole layer of problems in Russian society that appeared long ago.
until February 24. For example, one of the works is dedicated to the murder of Boris Nemtsov —
it shows a man being beheaded in a crowd against the backdrop of the Kremlin and cameras. Is this connected
with the war? Directly. Would it be relevant without the war? I think so.
There are also works that are not related to the war - for example, about a typical situation in Russia, when an official or security officer hits a person in a service car and avoids punishment by using his position."
