BRUSSELS.- Russia is the largest nation in the world: it stretches from Kaliningrad and the Baltic Sea in the west to Vladivostok and the Pacific Ocean in the east. A person traversing this land mass will go through eleven time zones. The exhibition in the Centre for Fine Arts is an invitation to discover Russia’s fictitious 12th time zone; that of contemporary art.

In the summer of 2018, curators Inke Arns and Dieter Roelstraete took part in an ambitious art expedition together with major figures from the Russian and international art world (artists, curators, directors of cultural institutions etc.) along the Trans-Siberian railway. Rather than visiting major cities like Moscow or Saint Petersburg, they stopped off in 12 lesser-known cities, such as Perm, Ulan-Ude, Tyumen and Irkutsk. At every stop on their journey they explored the local art sector, discovering the contemporary art that is flourishing far from the traditional power bases of Russian culture.

It was soon apparent that it would be an absurd task to summarise the rich and varied art scene of such an expansive and diverse country in one single representative exhibition. The curators have selected an artist or collective per city, with the aim to show the wide range of artistic practices. The 12th Time Zone is therefore presented as a scene report providing a look at the multi-faceted array of art across the sprawling Russian landscape.

The visitor will discover Russian artists involved in the international art scene such as Provmyza, Where Dogs Run, Damir Muratov, Natasha Yudina and Elena Anosova, as well as fresh talent exhibiting for the first time in Europe. Five artists are creating new work especially for the exhibition.

Introduction
More than a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its dissolution into 15 sovereign states – an experience that continues to color much of what happens within its bounds, in artistic, cultural and intellectual terms – Russia continues to be the largest country on earth – by a massive margin. One of the preferred metrics to best express its enormity likewise remains unchanged: the fact that, stretching all the way from Kaliningrad on the Baltic sea in the west to PetropavlovskKamchatskiy on the Pacific Ocean in the east, it covers a mind-boggling eleven time zones.

In the summer of 2018, a curatorial caravan crossed most of these time zones in search of art beyond the perimeter of Russia’s established (read: “western”) power centers, calling in a total of twelve cities sited along the iconic Trans-Siberian railway. The current exhibition showcases work made by artists from each of these ports of call, some better known, such as Ekaterinburg or Vladivostok, some much less so, like Omsk or Ulan-Ude. The resultant panorama – a “report”, not a survey – highlights some of the bracing diversity and heterogenous riches of art practiced in this largely unmapped, indeed unmappable, territory.

Where, then, does the titular twelfth time zone lie? We take it to be the transcending time of art – the only way, perhaps, to wrap our heads around the thought-defying immensity of the terrain under consideration. It is art o’clock aboard the Trans-Siberian – calling in Brussels all summer.

NIZHNY NOVGOROD - PROVMYZA
For Heraclitus, eternity was a „child playing a game, moving counters, in discord, in concord.“ The child we see in the film is weeping, and is carrying a heavy stone. It is climbing over half ruined walls of a giant industrial building, and is finally throwing the stone at the structure. The child – a girl – is crawling up a sand dune (the waste of an open pit mine?), and throws the heavy weight down when she reaches the top. We see her lying in a deep pit, barely able to climb up again – but attempting it, again and again. When she throws the stone/s at nature and at the remains of a huge industrial crane, we can also feel anger in her actions. The ruins of the industrial landscape look gigantic compared to the small human figure. One is reminded of the myth of Sisyphus, of Bulgakov’s Frieda, who is constantly offered a handkerchief, or we see the grown-up daughter of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, roaming in the Zone which gives neither fulfilment of desires, nor relief. Like her father, she is navigating the world through throwing a stone, a performative practice of tactile probing/exploration. And like Stalker’s daughter, she may be a child, but has the face of someone who has seen everything. (IA)

PERM - Elena Slobtseva
Objects sometimes do have a life of their own. Glasses are moving by themselves, or, rather, are moved by “spirits of the dead” called upon during a seance, stones are wandering in the desert, and computers are talking – to us or among themselves. In Elena Slobtseva’s work, it is neither glasses, stones nor computers, but huge staples that are behaving in unexpected ways. Usually, in Russia these staples are used for constructing typical wooden summer houses also known as dachas. But here, tens of thousands of steel staples can suddenly be seen performing in unexpected ways. As if re-enacting their own memories, they form images of landscapes, trees, houses, and of the horizon. We can only speculate about the force that induces movement into this strange material. Maybe it is through simple magnetism – or though magic. The title, however, suggests that these staples have an uncanny life of their own. (IA)

YEKATERINBURG - Where Dogs Run
Legend has it that Czar Peter the Great, on his voyage through western Europe in 1697, sent home Russia's first bag of potatoes. But for more than a century afterwards, the new tuber was widely considered poisonous and shunned as "the devil's apple". When Russian farmers finally warmed to the potato, in the mid-1800s, there was no stopping them: by 1973, the then-Soviet Union was producing more than 100 million tonnes of potatoes a year. Today, Russia's annual production has stabilized at around 35 million tonnes, thus making it a "potato giant", with output second only to China. The average Russian consumes a hearty 130 kg of potatoes a year. More than 90 percent are grown on household plots and private farms.

While in many American phrases, potatoes are used to describe laziness and dullness (like in “I am a potato”), in Russian, however, potatoes elicit senses of summer dachas and of strength. When people say they’re going to their dacha, they say they are going на картошку: to the potatoes. And now here we are, in a room full of levitating potatoes. Where has gravity gone? Are we in the Zone, so convincingly conveyed by Andrey Tarkovsky’s film Stalker? Or is this what Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism really was all about? (IA)

TYUMEN - Anton Vinogradov
Didn’t we all skip school at some point when we were kids or adolescents? Spending small fortunes on gaming machines in the nearby café, or stealing booze at the local gas station around the corner? Anton Vinogradov takes us to the places where he skipped school: An apple garden, a swamp, a field and a terrain vague. One even features a ship constructed from a pallet and a white cloth (the sail). There’s snow covered landscapes decorated with fire circles and bottles, arranged ornamentally. While all these places look like nature, at first glance, on all the photos we see concrete housing blocks looming in the background, through the trees and bushes. On the picture with the sailing boat, we are told that “A shopping centre will be built here.” Is it melancholy, memory, or a melancholic memory? What is more, the five lightboxes/places are linked to each other by a speculative map, which at times recalls a (psychological) development chart, connecting the swamp to the apple garden and then pointing outside of the picture, into the life of adulthood. While the land of childhood still promised small escapes, that of a grown-up happens in the concrete high-rises surrounding the garden of places where we once skipped school. (IA)

OMSK - Damir Muratov
“Siberia” is many things – a promise, an idea, a frontier, an expanse, an elsewhere, a curse – but a precisely defined geopolitical entity it is not: it may be said to begin “somewhere” (its standard western border usually considered to be the Urals), but the disagreement about its actual limit is so foundational that it may just as well be considered (fittingly so, of course) endless. All we know, among many other facts, is that, in the instance of the Sakha Republic, for example (though now technically a part of the Far Easter Federal District), it actually comprises the largest “subnational governing body by area in the world” – comparable in size to India.

Damir Muratov, a leading figure in the Siberian arts ecology, is the prime bard of this unfathomable tangle of geographical oddities, captured so poignantly in his crudely painted fictional flags denoting the non-extant “United States of Siberia” or “United Kingdom of Siberia”: countries wished into being by the sheer force of art, if you will – in this case, appropriately enough, Muratov’s caustic brand of prickly, faux-naif Sibirskiy pop. Modern-day icons simmering with anticipation, they flutter fitfully in a long line of pop art & agitprop forays into flag design. (DR)

NOVOSIBIRSK - Konstantin Skotnikov
According to Konstatin Skotnikov, Siberian artists brought “the innermost values of European culture deep into the continent” where they have been preserved “in absolute purity and beauty” – in schools, academies and universities. Therefore the Siberian artist – which is an imaginary figure – should be given a particular status in contemporary art.

Konstatin Skotnikov presents ten of these “European Siberians” who share their insights with us. “Rembrandt could not speak Russian!” boasts the architect Ivan Nevzgodin, author of The Architecture of Novosibirsk. “A poet in Russia – is more than a poet” underlines the poet Evgeny Miniyarov, cunningly. Another interjects: “The pen is mightier than the sword”. The Siberian creatives are bursting with confidence. It should not surprise us that the wisdoms of life uttered by the Siberian artists come with barely hidden ironic undertones. (IA)

TOMSK - Natasha Yudina
One of the oldest urban settlements in Siberia and a notable center of learning – it appears to have been dubbed the “Athens of Siberia” in the past – Tomsk is the only city in this exhibition that is not located on the Trans-Siberian mainline, which bypasses the city a mere hundred kilometers to the south. It is historically significant as the home-in-exile of the 19th-century anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin and a stronghold, during the Civil War that followed the October revolution, of the anti-Soviet White Army. A more permanent whiteness cyclically blankets Tomsk during Central Siberia’s fabled snow-rich winters – and likewise sets apart some of the city’s best-known artistic export products: the fur-clad sculptures and virgin knit- and needlework of Natasha Yudina.

Yudina has stated, with a steely Siberian sense of irony, that “art in Siberia needs to be warmed up, rolled up in wool, protected in skins.” The most famous icon of Soviet history to have received this wrapping treatment is the ubiquitous Lenin bust, featured so disarmingly in a double portrait alongside the artist titled “Judith and Holofernes”: a subtle sheen of violence, not without gendered overtones, coats much of Yudina’s plush, winking work. (DR)

KRASNOYARSK - Alexey Martins
In this installation sky and earth are intertwined. One side, entitled „Black Forest,“ represents a ruined soil that conjures up the image of “sprouted mycelium, crystalline structures or calcareous skeletons of various organisms living on the seabed.” The other side, entitled „Black Sky,“ appears to the audience as “pure materialized air so compressed that it hangs over the ‘inhabitants’ of this territory as some kind of threatening stalactite.”

In Krasnoyarsk, where Martins comes from, the term „black sky mode“ is used for describing heavy smog. While some air pollution is said to be caused by stoves and fires necessary for heating private houses in the cold weather, the main sources are probably local factories and the fumes they pump into the atmosphere. At Yenisei Pulp and Paper Mill a landfill with sawdust has been burning for months.

In Martins’ installation, the visitors are caught into a cloud of soil and air which due to pollution becomes more and more polluted, dense, and opaque. The artist has found a compelling form for visualising this dire ecological situation. (IA)

IRKUTSK - Elena Anosova
“Sagaan Sag” is a Buryat phrase meaning “white time” – the thirty- or forty-day period in December and January when Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal, one of the sunniest places on earth, is blanketed by a cloud-like fog so thick that transport from the island, home to some thousand people, to the mainland becomes temporarily suspended, while the ice is not yet solid enough to enable cars or trucks to cross the strait. “Sagaan Sag” is also the title of a suite of near-documentary photographs by Elena Anosova, who spent much of her youth on the island in Lake Baikal. (That this body of water, the largest freshwater lake in the world by volume, was inscribed in the Unesco World Heritage List in 1996 barely begins to scratch the surface of the site’s enduring, awe-inspiring holiness.) Anosova’s eerie depictions of windswept desolation and the abiding, austere beauty of winter’s whiteness zoom in on the various traces of human presence (or absence) scattered across the island, ranging from the futile to the heroic, from self-effacement to stoic resignation. A picture of a deserted yet joyfully color-rich children’s playground conjures an image of almost cosmic contrasts, of life lived lovingly along the living, heaving lake. (DR)

ULAN-UDE - Zorikto Dorzhiev
Ulan-Ude, capital of the Republic of Buryatia, sits at a peculiar intersection of diverging pasts – one ancient Mongol, another ancient Soviet – and intertwining futures – that of “New Silk Road” economic opportunity and reenergized cultural identity. One of the city’s signature aesthetic tropes neatly reflects this forking path in the meshing of artisanal techniques (one of the republic’s more popular creative exports are its beautiful handcrafted knives) and traditional narrative themes with a futurist manga-like sensibility suffused with female imagery and agency.

Zorikto Dorzhiev is among his generation’s most highly regarded artists, and his paintings and graphic work, much of which engages in an irreverent dialogue with canonical western art history, constitutes some of the most widely circulating Buryat art imagery. This newly conceived monumental sculpture – a model for a much larger monumental work to be erected in the south Siberian steppe – represents something of a departure. Traditional Buryat iconography is retained, however, in the outline of the figure’s head, shimmering with echoes of old-fashioned female headdress. (DR)

KHABAROVSK - Svetlana Tikanova
Located on the Amur river within proverbial spitting distance of the Chinese border, Khabarovsk is perhaps eastern Russia’s most “western” city – a little island of Petersburg planning in the boundless wastes of the Russian Far East. It is fitting, therefore, that this marvel of contrast and incongruity should be represented here by way of collage or photomontage – an art of juxtaposition with a particularly rich Russian prehistory. Indeed, in considering the photo-collages of Svetlana Tikanova, we are inevitably reminded of the pioneering precedents of El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis and Alexandr Rodchenko and the momentous, Soviet-era paradigm shift from the artist as formalist and pictorialist to the artist as activist message-maker. The message in question, of course, has altered dramatically, and so too has the historical breadth of the collaging instinct in artist hands such as Tikanova’s: the pictorial references roam wide and free, from fashion to cosmic imagery, with a telling focus on arthistorical allusions – Leonardo, Holbein, Botticelli. Titles such as “enigma,” “reflection”, “search” and “substitution” have a tentative ring to them: the future seems a faraway place, and the trust of old in it vaguely misplaced. (DR)

VLADIVOSTOK - Inna Dodiomova
Although founded as recently, relatively speaking, as 1860, the Pacific port city of Vladivostok – the mythical endpoint of the Trans-Siberian railway and a seven-day train ride away from Moscow, it literally translates as the “ruler of the east” – feels historical. This is a function, perhaps, of the city’s proximity to China, Korea and Japan, which accounts for a certain cosmopolitan and decidedly mercantile and multicultural flair, as well as a well-developed arts ecology. It is telling, for instance, that a well-regarded representative of a younger generation of Vladivistok artists such as Inna Dodiomova should have received part of her training in (relatively) nearby Harbin, the largest city in China’s northeastern region. Her work is rooted, in part, in the many historical complexities that attend her hometown’s location in these far-flung borderlands: her newly conceived installation Vortex recalls the memory of the Battle of Lake Khasan, “the tight corner where the territories of Korea, Manchuria, and Russia meet”, in the words of a military historian of the region. Vortex is a quasi-pyramidal sculpture made up of used cartridges whose gentle sway evokes the chime-like jangle of small change – of both the monetary and geopolitical kind. (DR)

NEMOSKVA
NEMOSKVA (More than Moscow) has been initiated in 2017 as a strategic project for the development of contemporary culture in the Russian regions for the period from 2018 to 2022. Its goal is to build horizontal links, to promote regional artists and curators, to study the current situation in the regions through professional dialogue and creating new possibilities for international partnership. The commissioner and author of the NEMOSKVA project idea is art historian and curator Alisa Prudnikova, commissioner and artistic director of the Ural Industrial Biennale, director for regional development of the ROSIZO-NCCA (National centre for the contemporary arts).

In August-September 2018, the International Mobile Symposium on the Trans-Siberian Railway was held, which brought together more than 50 foreign and more than 70 Russian leaders of cultural institutions, curators, practitioners and theorists of modern culture. In 2019, in addition to the exhibition project at the Centre for Fine Arts BOZAR, the presentation of the NEMOSKVA platform at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art took place. By 2020, The 12th Time Zone is planned to be held in Moscow and the regions.

Commissioner and author of the NEMOSKVA Project idea is Alisa Prudnikova, art historian and curator known as Commissioner and Artistic Director of the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, which has been repeatedly awarded the INNOVATION Russian National Art Prize. Having become the Director for Regional Development at ROSIZO and being one of the leading experts on regional cultural policy and art industry in Russia, Prudnikova invited notable contemporary art professionals of the international level to take part in the NEMOSKVA Project.