From May 31 to June 14, a contemporary art exhibition entitled Dvoeslovie/A Dialogue take place in the narthex of the St. Martyr Tatiana Church of the Moscow State University. The project became possible thanks to support from Stella Art Foundation.
“I think, the exhibition will be a sort of memorandum of intent to seek out a common language and bring the gaps,” archpriest Maxim Kozlov, the abbot of St. Tatiana’s Church, believes.
“Works presented by the artists explore the theme of the dialogue, while Church offers an exhibition space — a regular church, thus showing its interest for the theme,” artist Gor Chahal, one of the exhibition’s organizers, comments.
Archpriest Maxim points out that, rather than in the church itself, the exhibition will be held in an adjacent building: “In the church language it could be called narthex or antechurch, while in the secular language it is an assembly hall. Anyway, the idea of such neighborhood is quite daring.”
“Ideally, we, as the exhibition curators, wanted to highlight one trend in the contemporary art that develops, in one way or another, Christian culture today,” Gor Chahal notes, while admitting that this trend is so far difficult to discern.
Selection of works for the exhibition was a cooperative effort of both the artistic and the Christian Orthodox community. Excessively shocking works were rejected, and some artists with a record of opposition to Christian values and traditions were also denied participation.
Exhibition participants feature names like Nikita Alexeev, Kirill Asse, Tatiana Badanina, Dmitry Vrubel and Victoria Timofeeva, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Vladimir Kupriyanov, Alexander Sigutin, the Blue Soup Group (Alexey Dobrov, Daniil Lebedev, Alexander Lobanov, Valery Patkonen), Andrey Filippov, Gor Chahal.
The exhibition will showcase paintings, photographic and video projects, as well as installations.
