ANDREY SHABANOV / ANDY SHAB
art historian, curator from St Petersburg
lives and works in Berlin
сuratorial portfolio
aswhite25[at]gmail.com
Die Nacht bricht zuerst im Osten an (2024/26)
#dasneuemittelalter
coming soon
Grafikkabinett WöD (2017—2021)
works on paper of the 2010s generation
WöD was a Grafikkabinett in a bar setting. Collaborating principally with young authors, WöD captured and documented a number of noteworthy developments in graphic art by a generation of artists that emerged on the Saint Petersburg art scene over the course of the 2010s. In total, Grafikkabinett released 71 catalogues by artist-residents and guest artists. The exhibition Every Artist Is Someone’s Child was a culmination of the three-year run of Grafikkabinett WöD. An illustrated catalogue and its seven appendices represent different aspects of that eventful history.
Timur and Ivan (2021)
WöD: archival exhibition and reader
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, the exhibition and publication include artists’ and curators’ texts from the 1990s, critical reviews, recollections, and interviews with major participants in the historical events.
Coolhunters/ru (2021)
WöD: off-site exhibition
Every artist is someone’s child (2020)
WöD: final pop-up group show
The Defense (2018)
WöD: a series of desktop exhibitions
The Defense is a series of desktop exhibitions inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name. The project was a joint effort between Grafikkabinett WöD and the Vladimir Nabokov Museum, two neighboring institutions with similarly small and intimate spaces, and like minded interests (art, literature, and chess). Prompted by the novel or themes contained therein and also by his or her own creative trajectory, each artist proposed his or her own “defense”. Each new participant was free to use elements from the series’ previous exhibitions, thereby conversing with precedents and transforming the project into a unique creative palimpsest. The exhibitions were presented on the tabletop and inside the drawers of the large desk. During the opening of each exhibition, one could play chess with the artist whose exhibition was being presented at the time.
Vitrine. Inventing Everyday Life (2013—2017)
a series of site-specific curatorial interventions
Local Library Window is a project in which an exterior window of a library in a remote residential area in St Petersburg was used as an exhibition space. Five summer seasons, from 2013 to 2017, took place at this site, where, besides the library at Maurice Thorez Prospect, 32, no cultural establishments exist nearby. This curatorial intervention aimed to move contemporary art practices beyond the usual museum-gallery system toward a wider audience and to examine the different manifestations of everyday life in a place of its most apparent concentration.
Paradigm: The NORTH (2005—2006)
interdisciplinary research-based art project
PARADIGM is something between an art object and a detail from a research work. Contemporary artists and their works and intellectual writers meet on the pages of the PARADIGM just as they would at fairs, festivals, conferences and round tables... The essence of the PARADIGM project lies in examining, and where possible interpreting, the incarnations grouped around a polysemantic word, to determine the compilation of its cultural “declensions” and to discover — although hardly exhaust — its paradigm. The word for the first PARADIGM was NORTH. Within the book, visual material that illustrates and interprets the idea of the NORTH is intermixed with textual “excursions” dealing with linguistic and anthropological views of the NORTH, “northern architecture” and “northern cinema”, what the term “northern art” means and if the NORTH has art in the normal sense of the word. In other words, the NORTH is discussed on these pages on many levels: from a shared language to an individual biography.
SKIF contemporary art festival (2002—2004)
Texts (selected)
Sergey Bratkov, East minus West = (2024)
Evgeny Muzalevsky, Danke für deine Aufmerksamkeit (2024)
Berlin's artotheks. An Overview. Schön (2024)
Vlad Kulkov & Leonid Tskhe, The Risky and the Magician (2023)
Evgeny Muzalevsky, Muzalevsky (2023)
Jari Silomäki, Atlas of Emotions (2022)
Global Work of Art & Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta (2019)
Private collection. Highlights
Academic portfolio