SISTEMA GALLERY presents a final year exhibition of artists graduating from the Contemporary Art program at the Moscow School of Contemporary Art (MSCA) curated by Nadya October. During the program, students spent two years gradually immersing themselves in all the processes of the industry, learning to interact with the art environment and forming their own artistic language.

The New Essences exhibition was the result of the laboratory of curator Nadya October with 13 students, which was centered around the question “What does ‘the world-without-us’ mean?”. The outcome is 17 projects among which are objects, installations, painting, photography, works on fabric and a computer game. Together with the participants of the laboratory, the audience is invited to “think outside the box” and try to reflect on the unknowable.

“The world-without-us” is a statement made by the philosopher Eugene Tucker, referring to one of the main theses of the direction of the speculative realism philosophy: objects and reality exist independently of man. The world for man is limited by the possibilities of perception, which means that reality is completely inaccessible for understanding and “in fact” it can appear to be anything. But what is the way to conceptualize it? To further understand this thesis, students were offered a list of books by authors known in this area of philosophy, in addition to Eugene Tucker, including Graham Harman, Ben Woodard, Timothy Morton, and Quentin Meillassoux. 

Reflecting on the “extra-human”, students addressed images from mythology and mysticism, science fiction literature and cinema, matter from the microcosm and macrocosm, research on the prehistoric and cosmic, ecology and life after humanity. The main task was to shift the anthropocentric view: man is not the measure of all matters. 

Next stage of the laboratory was the search for how to embody the feeling of detachment and alienness of the “world-without-us” in art. With the students, the curator conducted a study of the methods of “object-oriented art”, which is directly connected with the mentioned new philosophical trend (ofluxo, kubaparis aggregators, etc.). Generalizing, we can say that these are the techniques of surrealistic distortion and collaging, as well as scenography of exposition with the effect of “presence”.

By the word “presence” we imply the creation of a feeling that the displayed artwork is a documentation of some existing form from another “reality”. The theme itself and the method of working with it changes the approach to the creation of the work and allows us to rely not on the history of art, but to carry out a free pursuit of form-making out of any materials and objects. 

The students used the described methodology to expand their practices, but in creating artworks they proceeded from their artistic interests and techniques they had already worked with. Some of the students turned to the creation of extraneous “organisms”, some of them – to the comprehension of ordinary objects as separate essences, breaking their usual functional perception. At the exhibition, the works complement each other, forming an overall unsettling atmosphere of the transitional state between living and artificial matters.

Curator of the exhibition: Nadya October

Artists: Ellie Alekseeva, Katya Gerun, Marina Grekova, Anna Epishina, Anna Zueva, Anastasia Kashuba, Dasha Lazareva, Katerina Osipova, Kristina Purshina, Sergey Ratnichkin, Dasha Sidorina, Lena Surova, Inna Shevchenko. 

The project was worked on by the curators and teachers of the MSCA Contemporary Art program: Alexey Mandych, Zhanna Bobrakova, Mikhail Levin.

The Moscow School of Contemporary Art (MSCA) is an educational institution that trains professional artists, curators, gallery owners, art managers and other specialists in the art sphere. The academic lineup includes programs of additional professional education, intensives and online courses. 

Exhibition activities are an integral part of the educational process at MSCA. Through exhibitions, students are integrated into the professional environment and the general public is introduced to their activities.