WöD was a Grafikkabinett in a bar setting. Working primarily with young authors, WöD documented and highlighted a number of significant developments in graphic art by a generation of artists who emerged on the Saint Petersburg art scene during the 2010s. In total, the Grafikkabinett published 71 catalogues featuring both resident and guest artists. The exhibition Every Artist Is Someone’s Child marked the culmination of the Grafikkabinett’s three-year run. An illustrated catalogue and its seven appendices reflect different aspects of that eventful history.

concluding catalogue

book trailer

catalogues of the artists

A collaborative project between the Grafikkabinett WöD and the European University at St Petersburg, the archival exhibition and the reader Timur and Ivan reconstruct and document the history of the appropriation of Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan by the St Petersburg art community. Beginning with the legendary exhibition of the same name at the Palace of Labour in 1993, both the exhibition and the publication bring together artists’ and curators’ texts from the 1990s, along with critical reviews, recollections, and interviews with major participants in those historical events.

reader

exhibition banners

leaftlet

poster

exhibition trailer

booklet

poster

banner

exhibition trailer

booklet

poster

commented list of works

curatorial introduction

exhibition trailer

The Defense is a series of desktop exhibitions inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name. The project was a joint initiative between the Grafikkabinett WöD and the Vladimir Nabokov Museum, two neighbouring institutions with similarly small and intimate spaces and like-minded interests in art, literature, and chess. Prompted by the novel, by its themes, and by their own creative trajectories, each artist proposed a personal “defense”. Every new participant was free to incorporate elements from previous exhibitions in the series, thus engaging in dialogue with their precedents and transforming the project into a unique creative palimpsest. The exhibitions were presented on the tabletop and within the drawers of a large desk. At each opening, visitors could play chess with the artist whose exhibition was then on display.

сatalogue

posters

Local Library Window was a project that used the exterior window of a library in a remote residential district of St Petersburg as an exhibition space. Over five summer seasons, from 2013 to 2017, the site hosted exhibitions in an area where, apart from the library at 32 Maurice Thorez Prospect, no other cultural institutions exist. This curatorial intervention sought to move contemporary art practices beyond the conventional museum–gallery system towards a broader audience, while also exploring the various manifestations of everyday life in a place where they are most densely concentrated.

catalogue

book trailer

PARADIGM is situated somewhere between an art object and a piece of research. Contemporary artists and their works encounter intellectual writers on the pages of PARADIGM just as they might at fairs, festivals, conferences, or round tables. The essence of the PARADIGM project lies in examining—and, where possible, interpreting—the incarnations clustered around a polysemantic word, in order to trace its cultural “declensions” and to approach—though never exhaust—its paradigm. The word chosen for the first issue of PARADIGM was NORTH. Within the book, visual material illustrating and interpreting the idea of the NORTH is interwoven with textual “excursions” on linguistic and anthropological perspectives, “northern architecture” and “northern cinema”, the meaning of the term “northern art”, and the question of whether the NORTH possesses art in the conventional sense of the word. In other words, the NORTH is explored here on many levels: from shared language to individual biography.

catalogue

project materials

Neudecker's Winterreise

Greifswald presentation

SKIF 8 (2004)

SKIF 7 (2003)

SKIF 6 (2002)

bizar.art (2022)

к.r.a.p.i.v.a (2020)

Masters Journal (2019)

Leonid Tskhe