The new exhibition was prepared in collaboration of the Research Arts Centre, gallery Triumph and the Nizhny Novgorod State Museum of Arts.
An exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod is our second and enhanced version of the two-part exhibition project held in 2020 in the halls of the Museum of Decorative, Applied, and Folk Arts in Moscow. The name A 15-Minute Break refers to having a rest to recover one’s strength for which we spend around 15 minutes. This unscheduled gap in the rhythm of the daily chores is hard to predict or forecast; it’s not something tied in the motion of stars. The pandemic and its restrictions made us all think about the pace of time. As was to be expected, labour and rest proved the most sensitive to the latest events.
In the part of the project dedicated to the labour the path goes from one specific subject to another through installations, painting, graphic, videos, modern sculpture and photography: working spaces, ideology and future of labour, getaway from the office, going back to craft, and certainly, digitization of the personality and work processes which became especially topical in the times of social distancing.
Works of the artists find two new definitions of having a break. First, this is team activities presupposing personal involvement like the seaside leasure, festivals, dinners, and tourism. Second, this is going for the individual experience of contemplation and non-doing: meditation, observation of nature, and spiritual practices which have become popular over latest years.
In addition to the works by contemporary artists, the exhibition presents some exhibits from the collection of the Nizhny Novgorod Arts Museum: pieces and compositions of bone, wood, bronze, and ceramics, and graphic art depicting illustrations to all kinds of labour and having a rest by authors from different historical periods.
“The layout and design of the exhibition invoke the association with the key colourful detail of today’s organization of the labour process, namely a set of bright-coloured stickers. The space of each hall becomes a sticker for an artist to fill in their ironical, critical, or reserved comments regarding the contemporary condition of labour expecting the break time”, the curators of the exhibition say.
See the PDF of the catalog
Curators: Kristina Romanova, Nayil Farkhatdinov
Architect Xenia Lukyanova
Participants:
Art Business Consulting Group, Vladimir Abikh, Elena Artiomenko, Liudmila Baronina, Sergei Gorshkov, Vladislav Yefimov, Vasia Zharkoy and Nastia Pozhidayeva, Maxim Ima, Alexei Iorsh, Zina Isupova, Sonia Kobozeva, Rodion Kitayev, Vladislav Kruchinski, Maxim Ksuta, Ikuru Kuwajima, Vik Lashhenov, Roman Mokrov, Igor Mukhin, Alexander Obrazumov, Mikhail Plokhotski, Ulyana Podkorytova, Alexander Povzner, Prometheus Institute, Igor Samoliot, Maria Safronova, Rostan Tavasiev, Eror TOY and the TOY Team, Sergei Filatov, Dmitry Shabalin, Sveta Shuvayeva, and the participants of Mikhail Plokhotski’s project The Needless Element: Inese Manguse, Peter Chumakov, Anton Nikolaev, Andrei Mitenev, Anastasia Sukhareva-Morozova, Oleg Katorgin, Andrei Kalmykov, Misha Goriachkin, Dmitry Liashenko, Yegor Plotnikov.
Information
Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Contemporary Arts
The aim of the Research Arts Centre is to unify the research efforts of the contemporary artists and scholars of humanities such as sociology, anthropology, and others. The objective of the Centre’s projects is to create diverse forms of experimental knowledge regarding the history of contemporaneity. The Centre was founded in 2013.
Centre’s website www.researcharts.ru