3rd Ural Industrial Biennial

The Iset Hotel, Credit: Vyacheslav Soldatov

Commissioner: Alisa Prudnikova

The 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art will open on September 9 and close on November 10, 2015, in Ekaterinburg and ten other cities of the Ural region.

The Biennial’s curators—Li Zhenhua (Beijing—Zurich) and Biljana Ciric (Shanghai)—announced the lists of Russian and international artists for the Main project. Fifty artists from twenty countries around the world will take part in the exhibition, including Yoko Ono (New York, USA), Alfredo Jaar (New York, USA), Tino Sehgal (Berlin, Germany) and Lee Kit (Taipei, Taiwan / Hong Kong).

Alisa Yoffe, Polina Kanis, Svetlana Shuvaeva, Anatoly Vyatkin, Victor Davydov, Yurko Koval are in the list of Russian artists, as well as Timofey Radya, the most famous Ekaterinburg-based artist.

The key term of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial is Mobilization, understood as an ability to change and rise to a fundamentally different level. Curator Li Zhenhua imagines his project titled “No Real Body” as an extreme way to find out if art has a starting point or an original source of creative energy. Biljana Ciric’s exhibition titled “Spaces for Maneuver—Between Abstraction and Accumulation” projects the general theme of Biennial Mobilization through centering the exhibition around the individual body as a site and tool negotiating individual existence between social abstraction and accumulation proposing to imagine rather than to produce.

The curatorial concepts will follow the logic of the space of the historic Iset Hotel, which is going to house a larger part of the Biennial’s programs—the main project, the final exhibition of the Artist-in-Residence program and research projects. The Iset Hotel is an integral part of the NKVD residential compound, which became popularly known as Gorodok chekistov (“Town of NKVD officers”): it is one of the most impressive architectural landmarks of Ekaterinburg and an outstanding example of international constructivist architecture of the 1920s-1930s.

Main programs of the 3^rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art

As part of the Artist-in-Residence program, artists from seven countries visited nine working enterprises of the Ural region from July 13-26, 2015. This trip constituted a research stage of the program and allowed the artists to immerse themselves into different stages of manufacturing process and prepare a series of site-specific projects.

The Biennial’s special project will continue a study of the industrial theme in art initiated by curator Kirill Svetlyakov in his exhibition “Modern Art Museum: The Department of Labour and Employment” prepared for the State Tretyakov Gallery. The exhibition will be presented at the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts and will use part of the museum’s collection.

The Ural Federal University has become a strategic partner of the Biennial’s intellectual platform for the third time and will host an international symposium “Strategies of Mobilization” with Pierre Belanger (Princeton School of Design), Sarah Wilson (Courtault Institute), Anthony Gardner (Oxford, Ruskin School of Art) and other international intellectuals as guest speakers.

The Biennial’s performance platform will take place in another constructivist masterpiece—a former Ural Worker Printing House—and will consist of a promenade-theater, a dance performance, and a special poetic concert specifically designed for the site and the occasion. It will draw upon the region’s performing arts cluster, including the drama school of Nikolay Kolyada and the world-famous contemporary dance companies.

The full press release can be viewed here.

For more information, please visit the official website of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial.