Anatoly Belkin. Literal Connections

The Sound of an Era: Recording and Distributing Rock Music in the USSR

Anatoly Belkin is an artist, cultural impresario, and mystifier — a participant in the first exhibitions of unofficial art in 1970s Leningrad and the founder of the St. Petersburg magazines Sobaka.ru and Veshch.doc. Today his work is held in the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and other museums around the world. From the late 1980s his solo exhibitions were staged in galleries in New York, Paris, London, and Berlin, and in 2004 his exhibition Gold of the Swamps — a grand project about a fictional "swamp civilization" — marked the breakthrough of contemporary Russian art into the Hermitage. Yet across his entire career the artist had only a single exhibition in Moscow: in 2006, at Triumph Gallery, where the Gold of the Swamps project was shown once again, once more in cooperation with the Hermitage.

Nearly twenty years later, in his second Moscow exhibition, Literal Connections, Belkin appears before the viewer not only as a master of visual play and mystification but also as a researcher of history, one who documents the meanings and forms slipping away into the past.

The exhibition includes works on paper from the Alphabet series, collages, bronze sculpture, and painting. Several of the artist's works are being shown publicly for the first time, among them the sculpture The Bronze Age, dedicated to Henry David Thoreau, and the collage Measure Seven Times, Cut Once, about the careful handling of the revolutionary art of the past.

The exhibition architecture, created by the studio PSCulture together with Yulia Napolova, underscores the project's research-driven, analytical character: with its diagonal corridors, projections, and niches, the exhibition space recalls museum display stands and the storage containers used for precious artifacts, inviting a fresh perspective on Belkin's work.