Eng:

To escape, you need to know firmly not where you are running, but from where. Therefore, it is necessary to constantly have your prison in front of your eyes.

I nodded, turned to the door and peered through the peephole. At first, only the blue dots of lanterns were visible through it, cutting through the frosty air, but we drove faster and faster - and soon, soon the sands were rustling around and the waterfalls of Inner Mongolia, dear to my heart, were rustling.

"Chapaev and Void", V. Pelevin

The exhibition plunges into the subjective-philosophical and mystical space described by one of the most sought-after and mysterious writers of our time, Viktor Pelevin, in the novel "Chapaev and the Void" - Inner Mongolia. The exhibition project turned out to be two-part: if in the first part, presented in March 2023, the main artistic research took place in the continuum of man-body-neurosis-escape-nature, then in the second part the search is conducted on the territory of the city in internal, private and external public spaces.

In 2022, the phrase "emigrating to Inner Mongolia" was more common than ever in social networks and conversations of Russian residents - a collective course towards escapism, escape from catastrophic reality. At the same time, the novel "Chapaev and the Void", in which the concept of "Inner Mongolia" appears in this metaphysical meaning, was written in the last period of social cataclysm and changes in Russia - the 90s of Perestroika - and today its content is again becoming acutely relevant. The novel subtly, deeply and ironically reflects the mentality and socio-political zen of Russia during the transition period, the duality of the world in which compatriots find themselves, and the third mythical place - Inner Mongolia - in which it is supposedly possible to escape from the insoluble contradictions of society.
The exhibition space invites you to find your point and plot a trajectory from it in an arbitrary direction on the coordinate axis: man-emptiness-neurosis-escape-city.
The project includes the works of 39 artists and art groups who, through installations, photography, ceramics, painting, sculpture and video performances, plot secret routes to Inner Mongolia inside a maze of glass and concrete, out of laws and restrictions.

Artists:
Olga Axenova, Zhanar Bereketova, Kirill Betekhin, Andrey Birger, Alexander Vecherov, Yanita Voit, Maria Golovkina, Nastya Gross, AM Group, Grigory Gryaznov, Ignatiy Gudkov, Svetlana Gudkova, Daria Danilova and Karina Shcherbakova, Anna Dvor, Nastya Egorova, Ksenia Efimova, Dmitry Zapylikhin, Larisa Zyuzina, Lidia Ilchuk, Anna Kanfer, Evgenia Kashaeva and Denis Karasev, Elizaveta Kashintseva, KeKe, Anna Kim, Maria Michi, Ekaterina Kozlova, Aglaya Kuznetsova, Natalia Mezheritskaya, Artem Muntyan, Olya Makhno, Nikita Orlov, Mikhail Plekhanov, Asya Susanina, Elena Tormysheva, Natalia Hapaeva-Shurpo, Nadezhda Khmyl, Mikhail Chulov, Cheyenne, Anna Syarova.

Curator: Kate Finkelstein