“Since its foundation, three exhibitions have already been held here” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Dmitry Butkevich recalls the phenomenon of apartment dwellers and talks about how this format is used today.

In the 1970s-1980s, apartment shows were a very common phenomenon in the USSR – these included exhibitions and even more famous underground concerts. Nonconformists showed works that were almost impossible to exhibit in public spaces. Viktor Tsoi, Vladimir Vysotsky, Yegor Letov, Yuri Shevchuk (the list is actually very long) started their “careers” this way.

By the way, the most famous points of such meetings were the Moscow apartment of the pianist Svyatoslav Richter on Bolshaya Bronnaya, the Leningrad apartment of the poet, dissident, “self-publisher” Konstantin Kuzminsky on Profsoyuzov Boulevard, numerous squats, including Furmanny Lane in Moscow and “ASSA”, created by Timur Novikov in Northern capital.

Nowadays, such projects carry practically nothing forbidden, but are no less interesting and in demand. They seem to bring the viewer closer to the work of art, allowing them to immediately see how they can live with it without interfering with each other.

Previously, I was somehow not very interested in this phenomenon, although I also visited the Austrian curator Simon Mraz at exhibitions in the apartment he rented in the famous House on the Embankment. I know that an apartment triennial is taking place in Samara. It has often become fashionable during other contemporary art shows to include such local venues with “home art”.

And recently I visited the apartment gallery of women’s art Murmure (in French “whisper”). It was founded by cultural scientist and journalist Ekaterina Kartseva. There is a hybrid of trends here: both an apartment gallery and women’s art, which is increasingly gaining momentum.

Since its foundation (summer 2023), three exhibitions have already been held here, where the works of seven artists were shown. And now, together with Pogodina Gallery and the Untitled Foundation, an exhibition “Lenticulars” by Olga Tobreluts, an internationally famous artist, is being held in a residential apartment on Leningradsky Prospekt (I remember being at the opening of her exhibition in Budapest).

She is one of the founders of media art in Russia, working at the intersection of painting, video art and computer print.