working on texts

The participants of the project “Art platform for the promotion of Ural contemporary art” are increasingly immersed in the practice of creating critical texts: together with international experts and Ural artists, they read, analyze and discuss texts about contemporary art. Behind the novice authors are numerous interviews, presentations, individual consultations with world-famous Tutors-Jonathan Habib Enqvist from Sweden, Nadine Reinert from Switzerland and Willem Jan Renders from the Netherlands. Now art critics have moved to a new stage of the project – the creation of texts about the work of Ural artists or their specific works.
– Our task is to present a portrait of the artist. To do this, I asked the participants of the “Art platform” to think about what three questions they would like to ask them. Any artist or any person who decided to call themselves an artist, – said the curator of the project Zhenya Chaika.
The discussion was attended by novice critics and 12 Ural artists. Elena Shubentseva, Maria Sedyaeva, Ksenia Markelova, Lyudmila Kalinichenko, Alexander Sidelnikov, Natalia Podunova, Olesya Ilyenok, Andrey Chugunov, Anna snegina, Alex Etwut, Udmurt, Museum of ever-playing attractions participated among the masters of modern art.
The meeting of aspiring authors and figures of modern fine art was traditionally held in an online format, but according to a completely new method of focused informal communication that is popular all over the world – World Cafe. This technique helps to reduce emotional tension in the team and develop new ideas. The participants of the discussion were divided into groups of five people. From time to time, communication was interrupted – art critics and artists changed places and exchanged ideas.
– We have identified four enlarged topics for discussion: personal, material, context, feedback – and left one time slot for free communication. Each topic showed its own facet of the artistic process, – Zhenya Chaika revealed the details of the working meeting. – Every week we try out new communication formats: from individual interviews to game formats divided into small groups. This is the most important part of the project: to show that we have a common language for conversation, moreover, that there can be many of these languages. It is especially valuable when you manage to break the classic interview setup: in a healthy communication environment, it can’t be that one (critic) always asks a question and the other (artist) answers; for a productive conversation, the curiosity must be mutual.
Recall that the project “Art platform for the promotion of Ural contemporary art” is implemented with the support of the presidential grants Fund. The unique cultural event is attended by 20 authors from Yekaterinburg, Perm, Chelyabinsk, Noyabrsk and other cities, 86 Ural contemporary artists and 4 international experts. Critics conduct interviews, talk about contemporary art and work on texts that will be published on the official website of the project with an English translation.