EXHIBITIONS
& ARTIST BOOKS

The Polyustrovo Hotel sits on historically charged ground in the Kalininsky District of Saint Petersburg. In the 19th century the area was a fashionable resort village where the cultural elite gathered to take the healing mineral waters discovered here in the early 1800s. The Polyustrovo springs became famous throughout Russia, drawing visitors including I.E. Repin, B.M. Kustodiev, P.I. Tchaikovsky, M.A. Mussorgsky and Alexandre Dumas père during his Russian travels.

Today the hotel functions as an unconventional exhibition space, carrying the ghost of Petersburg’s artistic golden age into the present. Its passage from imperial-era resort to Soviet-era hotel (built 1976 to 1979) to contemporary venue mirrors the city’s own layered history. Exhibiting here places the work in dialogue with both the city’s aristocratic past and its present as Russia’s most European cultural capital.

Perhaps the most spiritually charged space in contemporary Russia, a structure that exists outside all categories. Architect and artist Ildar Khanov (1939 to 2013), a graduate of the Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts, began building the temple in 1994 after what he described as a vision of Jesus Christ. It is not a place of worship but an architectural manifesto: a sprawling complex combining elements of Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and other faiths.

Khanov funded construction through donations from those he treated as a healer. His brother Ilgiz continues the work, so the temple remains perpetually unfinished, a building that will never be completed, much like the art it hosts. To exhibit here is to take part in an ongoing spiritual construction site.

An international project of the Kazan Club “The Artist’s Book” on the history and culture of the Hungarian and Tatar peoples, timed to the Year of Native Languages and National Unity. Its stated aim was to strengthen friendship between the two peoples and their trade and economic ties.

Published by the Kazan Club “The Artist’s Book” for the Year of Germany in Russia. Each box holds 20 original works on Dada in Germany, an opening essay on German Dadaism, a short history of printing techniques from Gutenberg to collagraphy, notes on every author and an art historian’s review.

Copies went to the participating artists and to museums in Russia and abroad. The book was presented at DADA. Germany in Kazan in 2021.

The exhibition marked the centenary of Joseph Beuys, a founding figure of Fluxus. The first hall held portraits of Beuys and works on his life; the second, works inspired by him and interpretations of his ideas. At the opening, visitors were given linocut portraits of Beuys in a performance.

In the museum’s exhibition text, art historian Tamara Zemlyanaya names Arkopravo Patra (Kolkata, India) among the artists showing Beuys as a creative mind with access to another dimension, drawing images and ideas from the unfamiliar.

MSIID is an entirely charitable museum founded in 2005, running without state funding and one of the only venues in Rostov where contemporary artists can exhibit free of rental charges.

Timed to the Year of Germany in Russia, the project took its name from Dada, the anti-war avant-garde of 1916 to 1922. It had two parts: “DADA”, graphics, collage and photography in the Dadaist spirit, and “Germany”, academic paintings of the country.

Two artist’s books were presented with it: the livre d’artiste DADA. Printed Graphics and The Fates of Russian Germans of Tatarstan. The curators’ announcement named Arkopravo Patra among the new names the project introduced.

Artdoc set Dada, a short and decisive period of absolute artistic freedom, against democracy, presenting photographers who question the social and political situation of the world today. The group included artists from Spain, Greece, Russia, India, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Australia, Armenia, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Poland and Turkey.