Soviet Union. Archeology of everyday life

Erarta Museum presents an art project that brings together the works of twenty-four artists from different regions of Russia. The exhibition is dedicated to the last, relatively prosperous decades of the existence of the Soviet Union - the poetics of everyday life of the 70s - 80s of the XX century. This project is not about the USSR as a state, not about socialism as a system - it is about the life and feelings of people of that time.

The approach to the topic is not political, but rather archaeological, memoir. Most of the works presented in the exhibition were created already in our time: these are memories, reconstructions, reflections on the past, influenced by various factors.

For young authors: Ivan Korshunov, Vadim Leukhin, Ilya Gaponov, Alexander Grekov - the Soviet Union is associated with memories from childhood. Some of them undertook impressive attempts to reconstruct images of the Soviet era in a monumental and romantic way. For artists of mature and older age: Konstantin Sutyagin, Alexander Kosenkov, Alla Davydova, Valery Lukka, Andrei Semenov, Pavel Tyryshkin, Natalia Shalina and others - the period of stagnation has become a part of the experienced and reflected reality. Their work, based on personal experience, is the embodiment of the individual perception of the era by its contemporaries.

The exhibition does not glorify, denounce, condemn, evaluate - it presents the late Soviet life in its usual course. Mitigated by a temporal perspective, looking into the past is inherently contemplative. Behind the unstable fabric of visual memories, some of which are ironic, one can feel the texture and intonation of a bygone era.

Petersburg artists took part in the project: Vasily Golubev, Ilya Gaponov, Alla Davydova, Georgy (Gaga) Kovenchuk (1933–2015), Alexander Kosenkov, Vadim Leukhin, Valery Lucca, Alexandra Ovchinnikova, Natalia Rumyantseva, Andrey Semenov, Natalya Shalina, Anna , Vladimir Shinkarev, Alexander Dashevsky, Anatoly Zaslavsky - as well as Ivan Korshunov, Alexey Lantsev, Konstantin Sutyagin, Pavel Tyryshkin (Moscow), Alexander Grekov (Perm), Artem Starodubtsev (Petrozavodsk), Nikolay Korotkov (Barnaul), Vladimir Fateev (Novosibirsk) , Galina Haylu (Krasnodar).