Vladimir Gorbunov and Ksenia Goncharova. "Industrial and Human"

The exhibition of the married couple Vladimir Gorbunov and Ksenia Goncharova is inspired by the life of the South Urals - native places for artists. Here, to the mountains and transparent blue lakes, they returned from St. Petersburg, having completed their studies at the Academy of Arts. 50 kilometers from the village where the artists live, there is Karabash, a city - an ecological disaster. Photos taken in the vicinity of Xenia's hometown are amazing - and the story about these places sounds like a chthonic myth. However, the full colors of Vladimir Gorbunov's painting and the pixelated images of Ksenia Goncharova's flowers have little to do with the frightening image of the South Urals portrayed in the media.

Both Ksenia and Vladimir are concerned about the modern: the development of technology, the inevitable digital progress. The universe, in which the artists are immersed, gives them much more impressions than TV shows and comics. Heroes of Vladimir and the world around them tragically do not keep pace with technology. They are not modern, but they already know the feelings of a man of the future - love for a family car and respect for the power of an excavator.

Both authors, to one degree or another, refer to the past - to the world before the Internet. This is evidenced by hand-made panels, pretending to be digital, and found objects by Vladimir Gorbunov. Progress is inexorably advancing on their artistic world, but the skins of electro-goats and the miraculously surviving cyberfish in the bottomless lakes testify that technology has not justified itself. Vladimir Gorbunov and Ksenia Goncharova discover and show to mankind the traces of an obviously developed civilization that once existed in the Urals. With this artistic gesture, they abandon techno-optimism, claiming the existence of something more significant - for example, a man in his pristine beauty.