Bagryanka
The Bagryanka Artists' Association was founded in Moscow in 2020 as a self-organization of graduates of the MMOMA Free Workshops. Its current members include Olga Gorodenskaya, Oks Rudko, Alexey Ryabov, Irina Turchenko, and others.
The group's main artistic directions are image theory, visual and medial turns in culture, and postconceptual artistic practices.
Using various media and genres in their artistic practice, the members of Bagryanka find common themes—factuality and archiving, the fusion of reality and virtuality, and "flat ontologies" in art.
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the Free Workshops School of Contemporary Art presented the project "SHOYA," created by the Bagryanka artists' association. In their project, the artists explore folklore—a cultural code where fact and fiction coexist.
The project's guiding principle is factuality. Its methodology defines the approach to collecting historical material and the sequence of its processing, classification, analysis, preservation, and transmission.
The exhibition is a total installation: a stream of images from art albums, archival photographs, texts, and illustrations; and the exhibition catalog, which was documented before it even opened.
Curator Oxana Chvyakina
MMOMA, 2022
Pestro rushed along the side of the road towards the shining half-decayed trees, which had burned down a decade ago in spite of the furious passion of the smoldering peat bog. Pestro hit the sand, got tangled in the power wires, but continued to strive to the place where the concrete slabs were overgrown with moss, as soon as the human race took its fears and legs away. Pestro did not realize that people know how to think and live according to linear laws, until they crashed into the structures they created, reminiscent of magnificent damage. Pestro realized that people know about them and, perhaps, even want to leave them something. Having buried ourselves in the plump core of a bumpy stump, Pestro save a moment and pampering the bark beetle.
The project "You Know, Sometimes I Think We're Worrying About the Wrong Thing" is a chronicle, a diary of observations of life in a settlement abandoned by humans due to a forest fire, and the surrounding natural area. It documents and explores the interactions of "non-human agents" (things, organisms, natural phenomena) that reveal their unique qualities in the process of liberation from human priority. In this fading of human influence, the objective environment changes its purpose, the resistance of materials is redistributed, often acquiring anomalous forms in human perception.
"Winzavod Open" "Multitude"(Moscow, 2021) – a group exhibition by the Free Workshops School of Contemporary Art, MMOMA – Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow – curators: S. Dorogina, I. Marinova, O. Chvyakina, E. Sheveleva, L. Yangirova
Field interventions of the project "You Know, Sometimes I Think We're Worrying About the Wrong Thing", Nowhere, Russia, 2020