The Innovation Award exhibition is an attempt to make a story of what contemporary art is today, to find and reveal the common denominator of all those projects when each of them is different, integral, and self-sufficient, and to invite the viewer to discuss the discovery.
We preserve the structure of the installation as it was in the previous years, when we take into account the peculiarities of the nominee projects. The nominations “Artist of the Year” and “New Generation” will be represented by original works or their fragments adapted for the exhibition. The works of the nominations “Project of the Year”, “Curator of the Year”, “Regional Project”, and “Educational Project” will be demonstrated as a ‘study’ where the showing of exhibits will be combined with demonstration of the Internet materials. You also will be able to have a look at the issues having got into the shortlist of the “Book of the Year” nomination.
The exhibition of the Innovation Award nominees is an attempt to make a story of what contemporary art is today, to find and reveal the common denominator of all those projects when each of them is different, integral, and self-sufficient, and to invite the viewer to discuss the discovery. This is my task as the museum curator.
This year the subject of the ‘educational overturn’ which is a milestone event in the art and art criticism of the beginning of the 21st century. Being a continuation of the linguistic overturn of the 1970s and the social overturn of the 1990s, it redefines the topical problems of contemporary art. What is knowledge today? How do we share it? What can art teach us and how does it do it? These questions critics and artists used to ask since 2006 took a new turn in 2020. The COVID pandemic and social isolation made the cultural and educational institutions to revisit their goals and capabilities. The cognitive function peculiar to art, that is, its capability to transfer knowledge through signs and characters, revealed itself in anew light when the world went online. This way or other, either through its form or substance, the educational overturn asserted itself in all the projects made by the Innovation Award nominees.
Darya Tkachova
curator, Head of the Exhibition Projects Department