4th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art: New Literacy

Credit: Curator of the 4th Biennial Main project João Ribas in the courtyard of the main venue.
Photo by Alexei Ponomarchuk, 2017

4th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art: New Literacy
September 14–November 12, 2017
Professional preview: September 12–13
Vernissage days: September 12–17
http://uralbiennale.ru

Yekaterinburg, Russia
Ural Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts NCCA-ROSIZO
Commissioner: Alisa Prudnikova
Curator of the Main Project: João Ribas

The theme of the 4th Ural Industrial Biennial is New Literacy, presenting works by over 100 Russian and international artists and a variety of educational programs and special projects.

The New Literacy anticipates the social, economic and cultural changes of the coming future, helping to understand the needs of the present as:

• tools to confront illiteracy, whether it is the actual verbal illiteracy or ignorance in any professional field (for example, the sphere of contemporary art or industrial production).
• a guide to the social, emotional and pleasurable conditions of work and play; a dictionary of mass culture that explains how to engage in it.
• a manual of using the latest cultural artifacts; how technological innovations transform daily life, settle in the natural language and enrich our day-to-day experience.

The following programs present different mediations on the topic:

Main project

Curated by João Ribas, the exhibition will confront the following guiding themes: The Image as Witness / Choreographies of Capital / The Persistence of the Word.

The fourth industrial revolution of information and communication technologies has transformed the way we live, work, dream, and play. How might the visual and bodily practices of contemporary artistic production form the basis for understanding the speeds, languages, and interfaces of this transformation? Employing the exhibition as a tool for visual, experiential, and discursive investigation, the 4th Ural Industrial Biennial organizes itself around the convergent themes to propose forms of critical literacy toward understanding new forms of visual, emotional, and social literacy.

The exhibition will occupy 5,000 square meters of an abandoned plant in the centre of the city of Yekaterinburg, drawing on the unique industrial architecture and context of the Urals.

Artist-in-residence program

Comprises the touristic route around key industrial spaces of the Urals, where artists created site-specific projects, and the curatorial exhibition located in the main venue.

Performance platform

A showcase of theatrical events happening in non-theatrical spaces: post-dramatic, performative experiences in strange surroundings, including the oratorio “Ural Lights”.

Intellectual and educational platform

Symposium, forum, roundtables, workshops and screenings

Special Projects

Research project “Avant-garde architecture of the ‘Big Ural’ cities”

Project “World Building” in the Nizhny Tagil, and others

João Ribas

João Ribas is a Deputy Director and Senior Curator of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal. Previously, he was a curator of the MIT List Visual Arts Center (2009–13) and the Drawing Center in New York (2007–09).

Among his recent projects are group exhibitions: Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime (2015), Serralves Museum; and In the Holocene (2012), MIT List Visual Arts Center; and monographic exhibitions of the work of Michael Krebber, Helena Almeida, The Otolith Group, Chris Marker, Joachim Koester, Akram Zaatari, Otto Piene, Frances Stark, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Rachel Rose, among others. He is the winner of four consecutive AICA Exhibition Awards (2008–11) and of an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2010). His writing has been featured in numerous catalogs and publications, and he has taught at Yale, RISD, and the School of Visual Arts, New York.

For more information please contact:
Maria Domracheva, program coordinator of the 4th Ural Industrial Biennial
mariia.domracheva@gmail.com