Great Expectations

Moscow City Department of Culture

Museum and Exhibition Association “Manege”

Triumph Gallery

Artists: Antonina Baever, Sofia Gavrilova, Evgeny Granilshchikov, Vera Konyashova, Elena Koptyaeva, Nastya Kuzmina, Roman Mokrov, Nikolai Onishchenko, Maria Sakirko, Albert Soldatov, Alisa Taezhnaya, Alexei Taruts, Dmitry Venkov.

Curators: Elena Rumyantseva, Natalia Nusinova

In December of 2013, MEA “Manege”, Triumph Gallery and the Center of Culture and Art MediaArtLab established a new project titled “Great Expectations” in support of contemporary art.

Over the past year solo exhibitions of works by young Russian media artist have been presented at CEH “Manege” every month. Thirteen artists took part in the project, and for them it was a unique opportunity to present a solo show to a wide audience retaining at the same time the freedom of an artistic experiment.

The final exhibition will present a new generation of young artists, who work with new media — video, photography, installations. Their names may well be significant in the future.

Olga Shishko, the project’s curator, the Manege’s Deputy general director for innovations in contemporary art: “The showing of video works by young artists at a central venue in Moscow is a major art event. Video art today is primarily a new language, a means of perceiving the world, with the help of which it is possible to ‘sound out’ the actuality of our surroundings, seeing beyond the reach of our eyes, and transforming reality to suit our tastes. The young artists we have presented throughout the “Great Expectations” project are all engaged in exploring aspects of viewers’ perceptions. They work with the theme of the mockumentary, creating visual mystification, experimenting with the tactile nature of video language, creating a new narrative in the quest for an “intelligent image,” drawing the attention of the viewer to the transformation of our linear perception into the spatial.”

Dmitry Khankin, co-owner of Triumph Gallery: “Triumph Gallery supports the coming generation of Russian video artists for two reasons: firstly, because we believe in these people, we believe that what they have to say is significant. Secondly, because we believe in video as a medium of the here and now, a medium which doesn’t compete with traditional media, but that is capable of meeting the demands posed on art by the present day. Young artists have taken part in group exhibitions and festivals, but there has been no specialized institutional venue that would serve as the next step in the development of their careers. Through “Great expectations” project, video artists are given the opportunity to present personal projects in one of the central exhibition spaces. This series of exhibitions takes in everyone for whom we really do have great expectations, and those expectations are gradually being realized”.