Main Collection

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art archive

Private gift

Acquired from the artist

Acquired at auction from Vladey

Gift of Anton Belov

Poet and Pistol is one of Gor Chahal’s earliest works and comprises photographs made by Andrei Bezukladnikov, collages, painting, and poems. Addressing himself to the binomial “artist‑personality,” who was an important element of the conceptual art of the 1970s, he is transformed into a romantic decadent poet and depicts him in the monochrome style of noir or the filmmakers of the “new wave.” Using curly hair, white shirt, tie and black jacket Chahal aestheticizes the life of his lyrical hero, contrasting it to Soviet reality and that of the Perestroika period. He brings together contradictions — life and death, abstraction and reality, invention and fact — in a single series without a defined narrative, anticipating the consciousness of the video clip. The handsome dandy wanders Moscow’s boulevards, gateways, and hotels in attempt to find a victim or escape the uncertainty of death, and life goes on in the background: mothers with prams, passers‑by on benches. He is a superfluous person, an aesthetically alien element who is out of time and place. This is how Gor Chahal visualizes the poetic metaphor of his art, which was marginal in the Perestoika period and unable to catch up with rapidly changing reality.

 Poet and Pistol is one of Gor Chahal’s earliest works and comprises photographs made by Andrei Bezukladnikov, collages, painting, and poems. Addressing himself to the binomial “artist‑personality,” who was an important element of the conceptual art of the 1970s, he is transformed into a romantic decadent poet and depicts him in the monochrome style of noir or the filmmakers of the “new wave.” Using curly hair, white shirt, tie and black jacket Chahal aestheticizes the life of his lyrical hero, contrasting it to Soviet reality and that of the Perestroika period. He brings together contradictions — life and death, abstraction and reality, invention and fact — in a single series without a defined narrative, anticipating the consciousness of the video clip. The handsome dandy wanders Moscow’s boulevards, gateways, and hotels in attempt to find a victim or escape the uncertainty of death, and life goes on in the background: mothers with prams, passers‑by on benches. He is a superfluous person, an aesthetically alien element who is out of time and place. This is how Gor Chahal visualizes the poetic metaphor of his art, which was marginal in the Perestoika period and unable to catch up with rapidly changing reality. 

Poet and Pistol

Arkady Nasonov is one of the key representatives of the younger generation of conceptualists and works at the intersection of painting, drawing, performance, and text. His synthetic art brings together fact and fiction, dream and reality, passing them through the aesthetics of the Moscow Conceptual School. 

 Beyond the Horizon is one of the first book‑objects created by Nasonov after the founding of the group Cloud Commission in 1992. It is linked to the subject of poet Alexander Delfinov’s mystical story “From the Notebook of Doctor Garkavy,” in which childhood memories, paranormal phenomena, military secrets, and Garkavy’s “cloud poems” intertwine (at the end the mysterious blue cloud becomes a portal between worlds and dimensions). However, Nasonov does not recall which came first, the text or the drawings. 

 The book is a panoramic interactive object that is over 2.5 meters long and features drawings and appliqué. It is a book‑journey in which three‑dimensional elements replace each other like theater sets, leading the reader through clouds that are just about to disperse, lifting the veil of mystery. 

 As one of Doctor Garkavy’s poems puts it: 

 Everything that was, everything that will be
Will unroll like Scotch tape
And adhere to the sky,
Concealing the clouds.

 Arkady Nasonov is one of the key representatives of the younger generation of conceptualists and works at the intersection of painting, drawing, performance, and text. His synthetic art brings together fact and fiction, dream and reality, passing them through the aesthetics of the Moscow Conceptual School. 

  Beyond the Horizon  is one of the first book‑objects created by Nasonov after the founding of the group Cloud Commission in 1992. It is linked to the subject of poet Alexander Delfinov’s mystical story “From the Notebook of Doctor Garkavy,” in which childhood memories, paranormal phenomena, military secrets, and Garkavy’s “cloud poems” intertwine (at the end the mysterious blue cloud becomes a portal between worlds and dimensions). However, Nasonov does not recall which came first, the text or the drawings. 

 The book is a panoramic interactive object that is over 2.5 meters long and features drawings and appliqué. It is a book‑journey in which three‑dimensional elements replace each other like theater sets, leading the reader through clouds that are just about to disperse, lifting the veil of mystery. 

 As one of Doctor Garkavy’s poems puts it: 

 Everything that was, everything that will be
Will unroll like Scotch tape
And adhere to the sky,
Concealing the clouds. 

Beyond the Horizon

Poet and Pistol is one of Gor Chahal’s earliest works and comprises photographs made by Andrei Bezukladnikov, collages, painting, and poems. Addressing himself to the binomial “artist‑personality,” who was an important element of the conceptual art of the 1970s, he is transformed into a romantic decadent poet and depicts him in the monochrome style of noir or the filmmakers of the “new wave.” Using curly hair, white shirt, tie and black jacket Chahal aestheticizes the life of his lyrical hero, contrasting it to Soviet reality and that of the Perestroika period. He brings together contradictions — life and death, abstraction and reality, invention and fact‑in a single series without a defined narrative, anticipating the consciousness of the video clip. The handsome dandy wanders Moscow’s boulevards, gateways, and hotels in attempt to find a victim or escape the uncertainty of death, and life goes on in the background: mothers with prams, passers‑by on benches. He is a superfluous person, an aesthetically alien element who is out of time and place. This is how Gor Chahal visualizes the poetic metaphor of his art, which was marginal in the Perestoika period and unable to catch up with rapidly changing reality.

 Poet and Pistol is one of Gor Chahal’s earliest works and comprises photographs made by Andrei Bezukladnikov, collages, painting, and poems. Addressing himself to the binomial “artist‑personality,” who was an important element of the conceptual art of the 1970s, he is transformed into a romantic decadent poet and depicts him in the monochrome style of noir or the filmmakers of the “new wave.” Using curly hair, white shirt, tie and black jacket Chahal aestheticizes the life of his lyrical hero, contrasting it to Soviet reality and that of the Perestroika period. He brings together contradictions — life and death, abstraction and reality, invention and fact‑in a single series without a defined narrative, anticipating the consciousness of the video clip. The handsome dandy wanders Moscow’s boulevards, gateways, and hotels in attempt to find a victim or escape the uncertainty of death, and life goes on in the background: mothers with prams, passers‑by on benches. He is a superfluous person, an aesthetically alien element who is out of time and place. This is how Gor Chahal visualizes the poetic metaphor of his art, which was marginal in the Perestoika period and unable to catch up with rapidly changing reality. 

Untitled

ZIP Group is a collective of artists from Krasnodar (Stepan Subbotin, Vasily Subbotin, Evgeny Rimkevich, Eldar Ganeev (to 2017), Konstantin Chekmarev (to 2012), and Denis Serenko (to 2011)) that came together in 2009 and became one of the most significant phenomena on the Russian contemporary scene of the 2010s and 2020s. The name of the group is derived from Krasnodar Measuring Instruments Factory (Zavod izmeritel’nykh priborov), where the artists’ studios were located until 2015 and where their first exhibition took place. 

 The ZIP artists have won numerous awards and over 15 years they formed a unique art scene in Krasnodar, founding Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KISI) and organizing the independent street art festival MOZHET (since 2010). ZIP Group mainly works with the genre of total installation, using its projects to explore themes of labor, community, and self‑organization, creating utopian spaces for work, leisure, and interaction. 

 The Panels are part of the installation DK ZIP Stop and were shown at Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2017, as a result of which the group won Project of the Year at the 11th Kandinsky Prize ceremony. The project occupied the fourth floor and was a detailed report on seven years of working together. Rather than a classic retrospective, the artists presented viewers with a journey through the group’s mythologized universe. Curator Elena Selina described it as follows: “It is no accident that the exhibition develops upward through the various floors. It begins with the present (‘Now’) and ends with ‘BARcelona,’ with the past (‘The Day Before Yesterday’) and the future (‘Then’) in between. The present on the first floor, according to the artist’s witty definition, is ‘a street hallucination’ that has frozen for a second before dissolving in the calm contemplation of the past on the second floor. On the third floor, viewers can look through spyglasses at a utopian future and spin in the timeless cycle of ‘BARcelona’ on the top floor.” The Panels offer an excursus into the story of the Pyatikhatki art residency and take the form of a collage made from local maps, photographs, and descriptions of exhibitions and actions of various years.

 ZIP Group is a collective of artists from Krasnodar (Stepan Subbotin, Vasily Subbotin, Evgeny Rimkevich, Eldar Ganeev (to 2017), Konstantin Chekmarev (to 2012), and Denis Serenko (to 2011)) that came together in 2009 and became one of the most significant phenomena on the Russian contemporary scene of the 2010s and 2020s. The name of the group is derived from Krasnodar Measuring Instruments Factory (Zavod izmeritel’nykh priborov), where the artists’ studios were located until 2015 and where their first exhibition took place. 

 The ZIP artists have won numerous awards and over 15 years they formed a unique art scene in Krasnodar, founding Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KISI) and organizing the independent street art festival MOZHET (since 2010). ZIP Group mainly works with the genre of total installation, using its projects to explore themes of labor, community, and self‑organization, creating utopian spaces for work, leisure, and interaction. 

 The Panels are part of the installation DK ZIP Stop and were shown at Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2017, as a result of which the group won Project of the Year at the 11th Kandinsky Prize ceremony. The project occupied the fourth floor and was a detailed report on seven years of working together. Rather than a classic retrospective, the artists presented viewers with a journey through the group’s mythologized universe. Curator Elena Selina described it as follows: “It is no accident that the exhibition develops upward through the various floors. It begins with the present (‘Now’) and ends with ‘BARcelona,’ with the past (‘The Day Before Yesterday’) and the future (‘Then’) in between. The present on the first floor, according to the artist’s witty definition, is ‘a street hallucination’ that has frozen for a second before dissolving in the calm contemplation of the past on the second floor. On the third floor, viewers can look through spyglasses at a utopian future and spin in the timeless cycle of ‘BARcelona’ on the top floor.” The Panels offer an excursus into the story of the Pyatikhatki art residency and take the form of a collage made from local maps, photographs, and descriptions of exhibitions and actions of various years. 

Panel 1

Anna Tereshkina’s artistic practice is defined by interdisciplinarity, multiple genres, and cooperation with other people from various spheres. She explores the themes of gender research, personal and collective memory, protection of human rights, and social critique.

A Book for Girls demonstrates the strategy of rethinking traditional gender stereotypes. Using a found 1991 encyclopedia of domestic science, For You, Girls!, which teaches “how to look after the home, be tidy, healthy, and dexterous,” Tereshkina incorporates rebellious drawings, collages, and everyday artifacts, such as sweet wrappers, tickets, and magazine cuttings, thus disrupting the normative content of the book.

The texts and illustrations about keeping house are in dialogue with visual elements that are provocative, absurd, ironic, chaotic, and childishly expressive. The artist makes fun of or ignores the imposed female roles, turning the book into a feminist statement that is in opposition to fixed models of education.

Anna Tereshkina’s artistic practice is defined by interdisciplinarity, multiple genres, and cooperation with other people from various spheres. She explores the themes of gender research, personal and collective memory, protection of human rights, and social critique.

A Book for Girls demonstrates the strategy of rethinking traditional gender stereotypes. Using a found 1991 encyclopedia of domestic science, For You, Girls!, which teaches “how to look after the home, be tidy, healthy, and dexterous,” Tereshkina incorporates rebellious drawings, collages, and everyday artifacts, such as sweet wrappers, tickets, and magazine cuttings, thus disrupting the normative content of the book.

The texts and illustrations about keeping house are in dialogue with visual elements that are provocative, absurd, ironic, chaotic, and childishly expressive. The artist makes fun of or ignores the imposed female roles, turning the book into a feminist statement that is in opposition to fixed models of education.

A Book for Girls

Panel 2

ZIP Group is a collective of artists from Krasnodar (Stepan Subbotin, Vasily Subbotin, Evgeny Rimkevich, Eldar Ganeev (to 2017), Konstantin Chekmarev (to 2012), and Denis Serenko (to 2011)) that came together in 2009 and became one of the most significant phenomena on the Russian contemporary scene of the 2010s and 2020s. The name of the group is derived from Krasnodar Measuring Instruments Factory (Zavod izmeritel’nykh priborov), where the artists’ studios were located until 2015 and where their first exhibition took place. 

 ZIP Group focuses on the study of labor and leisure, post‑Soviet cultural heritage, local narratives, and the processes behind the formation of associations and communities. The artists mostly create objects and various forms of installations using primarily construction and “poor” materials. As well as making art, group participants are involved in education projects, the most of important of which is Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KISI), founded in 2011. ZIP artists also often work on their own curatorial projects. These include the MOZHET festival, founded in 2010, and exhibitions at Typography Center for Contemporary Culture (2012–2022). 

 The work Panel 3 explores all of these aspects of the group’s work and is a collage of an artistic archive of projects, events, and objects connected to ZIP Group’s activities. The collage includes:
- documentation of exhibitions and artworks by Krasnodar artists (such as photographs of the exhibitions Builders of Spring and On the Way and works from the MOZHET festival over the years);
- documentation of internal processes and artistic and curatorial work (such as photographs from the installation of the exhibition This Workshop is Fighting for the Title of Model Workshop and the exhibition and research project Green Farmstead);
- personal materials (such as photographs of the former Kuban printing works that was the location of the artists’ first studios and the initial lectures of KISI; photographs of friends at various events). 

 This proximity enables us to see ZIP Group’s projects as, among other things, activity directed at forming a local community of professionals, co‑thinkers, and friends. 

 The main characters in this work include not only people from the Krasnodar art scene but also the city itself. By adding to the collage an image of the Kuban River, which crosses the city, ZIP Group gives the work a form somewhat like a map. That said, when comparing Panel 3 with a real map of Krasnodar it is almost impossible to correctly define the topography of places and events. Another map placed at the center of the work is hand‑drawn and also somewhat relative. Thanks to this technique the city appears as a collective psychogeographical image created directly by people within its art scene. 

 In Panel 3, archiving works not only as a means of preservation but also as an expression of the functioning of the local community and of the processes within the Krasnodar art scene of the 2010s. This work was created for the artists’ solo exhibition DK ZIP Stop, which took place at Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2017. In the same year the project was awarded the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination Project of the Year.

 ZIP Group is a collective of artists from Krasnodar (Stepan Subbotin, Vasily Subbotin, Evgeny Rimkevich, Eldar Ganeev (to 2017), Konstantin Chekmarev (to 2012), and Denis Serenko (to 2011)) that came together in 2009 and became one of the most significant phenomena on the Russian contemporary scene of the 2010s and 2020s. The name of the group is derived from Krasnodar Measuring Instruments Factory (Zavod izmeritel’nykh priborov), where the artists’ studios were located until 2015 and where their first exhibition took place. 

 ZIP Group focuses on the study of labor and leisure, post‑Soviet cultural heritage, local narratives, and the processes behind the formation of associations and communities. The artists mostly create objects and various forms of installations using primarily construction and “poor” materials. As well as making art, group participants are involved in education projects, the most of important of which is Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KISI), founded in 2011. ZIP artists also often work on their own curatorial projects. These include the MOZHET festival, founded in 2010, and exhibitions at Typography Center for Contemporary Culture (2012–2022). 

 The work Panel 3 explores all of these aspects of the group’s work and is a collage of an artistic archive of projects, events, and objects connected to ZIP Group’s activities. The collage includes:
- documentation of exhibitions and artworks by Krasnodar artists (such as photographs of the exhibitions Builders of Spring and On the Way and works from the MOZHET festival over the years);
- documentation of internal processes and artistic and curatorial work (such as photographs from the installation of the exhibition This Workshop is Fighting for the Title of Model Workshop and the exhibition and research project Green Farmstead);
- personal materials (such as photographs of the former Kuban printing works that was the location of the artists’ first studios and the initial lectures of KISI; photographs of friends at various events). 

 This proximity enables us to see ZIP Group’s projects as, among other things, activity directed at forming a local community of professionals, co‑thinkers, and friends. 

 The main characters in this work include not only people from the Krasnodar art scene but also the city itself. By adding to the collage an image of the Kuban River, which crosses the city, ZIP Group gives the work a form somewhat like a map. That said, when comparing Panel 3 with a real map of Krasnodar it is almost impossible to correctly define the topography of places and events. Another map placed at the center of the work is hand‑drawn and also somewhat relative. Thanks to this technique the city appears as a collective psychogeographical image created directly by people within its art scene. 

 In Panel 3, archiving works not only as a means of preservation but also as an expression of the functioning of the local community and of the processes within the Krasnodar art scene of the 2010s. This work was created for the artists’ solo exhibition DK ZIP Stop, which took place at Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2017. In the same year the project was awarded the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination Project of the Year. 

Panel 3

In 1986, four friends decided to form an art group called World Champions. Despite its short life (the group disbanded in 1988), World Champions was one of the most striking artistic phenomena of the perestroika period. The backbone of the group comprised Gia Abramishvili, Konstantin Latyshev, Boris Matrosov and Andrei Yakhnin. They studied together at Moscow’s School No. 96 in Bolshoi Tishinsky Pereulok, where they were taught physics by a very special man, Evgeny Matusov. He organized meetings with interesting people for his students, including Boris Grebenshchikov, Sven Gundlakh, and Konstantin Zvezdochotov. Contact with these people grew into friendship and then joint artistic practice. 

 The “champions” selected irony as their main tool for dissecting both late‑1980s Soviet reality and the specific, closed world of unofficial art. They made fun of the unintelligible practices of the older generation of Moscow conceptualists and of state sport and public organizations, with their outdated methods of transforming groups of individuals into collectives. The group’s actions and demonstrations had an absurd and spontaneous character in which a sudden idea of a “meaningless feat” was immediately embodied, erasing the boundaries between art and life. The artists changed the direction of rivers, used shampoo and rags to clean the Black Sea cliffs and seafront, and created pictures and objects from worthless materials, with no interest in preserving them after they had been shown at a one‑day exhibition. 

 When creating drawings and paintings the “champions” parodied the team method of making state commissions for artistic products. Participants published a decree that defined in detail not only the image but also the quantity of materials available to the artist who would make it. The group’s garish, flashy paintings are stylistically similar to children’s drawings and lubok folk prints, comics, and posters. 

 The artists often added found photographs or illustrations to the picture surface and also deliberately omitted letters in texts, whether they were lists of decrees or inscriptions directly incorporated in the image. In his 1989 work Everything Happened So Suddenly! No One Expected It, Not Even Molokhove, Konstantin Zvezdochotov uses a photograph of a dead man surrounded by grieving relatives, hinting at the unenviable fate of the main character in the composition, who was trying to escape pursuit in a red automobile. The omission of the last two letters of the family name Molokhovets also underlines how rapidly these events unfolded.

 In 1986, four friends decided to form an art group called World Champions. Despite its short life (the group disbanded in 1988), World Champions was one of the most striking artistic phenomena of the perestroika period. The backbone of the group comprised Gia Abramishvili, Konstantin Latyshev, Boris Matrosov and Andrei Yakhnin. They studied together at Moscow’s School No. 96 in Bolshoi Tishinsky Pereulok, where they were taught physics by a very special man, Evgeny Matusov. He organized meetings with interesting people for his students, including Boris Grebenshchikov, Sven Gundlakh, and Konstantin Zvezdochotov. Contact with these people grew into friendship and then joint artistic practice. 

 The “champions” selected irony as their main tool for dissecting both late‑1980s Soviet reality and the specific, closed world of unofficial art. They made fun of the unintelligible practices of the older generation of Moscow conceptualists and of state sport and public organizations, with their outdated methods of transforming groups of individuals into collectives. The group’s actions and demonstrations had an absurd and spontaneous character in which a sudden idea of a “meaningless feat” was immediately embodied, erasing the boundaries between art and life. The artists changed the direction of rivers, used shampoo and rags to clean the Black Sea cliffs and seafront, and created pictures and objects from worthless materials, with no interest in preserving them after they had been shown at a one‑day exhibition. 

 When creating drawings and paintings the “champions” parodied the team method of making state commissions for artistic products. Participants published a decree that defined in detail not only the image but also the quantity of materials available to the artist who would make it. The group’s garish, flashy paintings are stylistically similar to children’s drawings and lubok folk prints, comics, and posters. 

 The artists often added found photographs or illustrations to the picture surface and also deliberately omitted letters in texts, whether they were lists of decrees or inscriptions directly incorporated in the image. In his 1989 work Everything Happened So Suddenly! No One Expected It, Not Even Molokhove, Konstantin Zvezdochotov uses a photograph of a dead man surrounded by grieving relatives, hinting at the unenviable fate of the main character in the composition, who was trying to escape pursuit in a red automobile. The omission of the last two letters of the family name Molokhovets also underlines how rapidly these events unfolded. 

It Happened in an Instant! No One Expected It… Not Even Molokhove

1. Открытый доступ

Мастер

World Champions was a Moscow art group made up of a group of friends who had studied at School No. 98 and Krasnopresnenskaya Art School. The group included Gia Abramishvili, Konstantin Zvezdochotov, Konstantin Latyshev, Boris Matrosov, Andrei Yakhnin, and others. In 2021 there was a retrospective exhibition of the group’s work at Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

World Champions

ZIP Group was founded in 2009 in Krasnodar by artists Eldar Ganeev, Evgeny Rimkevich, Denis Serenko, Vasily Subbotin, Stepan Subbotin, and Konstantin Chekmarev. The group is the recipient of the Innovation Prize in the nomination Regional Contemporary Art Project (with activists from KISI, 2014) and the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination Project of the Year (2017).

Arkady Nasonov was born in Sverdlovsk. He graduated from the Design Faculty of the Moscow Arts Theater School and Studio (1991). Together with Dmitry Ligeiros and Tatyana Detkina he founded the art group Cloud Commission (1992). He was a member of the poetry society TARTU (1995–1999). He is a recipient of grants from the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam, 1999), Künstlerhäuser Worpswede (Germany, 2002), and La Napoule Art Foundation (Cannes, 2005).

Nasonov Arkady

Konstantin Zvezdochotov was born in Moscow. From 1976 to 1981 he studied in the Production Department of the Higher School and Studio of Moscow Gorky Academic Art Theater. He was a founder and member of numerous art groups, including Toadstool Group and World Champions. Selected group exhibitions: 44th Venice Biennale (Aperto, 1990); documenta 9, Kassel (1992), 3rd Istanbul Biennial (1992); 2nd and 3rd Cetinski Bijenale (1994, 1997); 50th Venice Biennale (Russian Pavilion, 2003).

Zvezdochotov Konstantin

Gor Chahal is a mathematician by training, the author of poems and musical‑poetic performances, and one of the pioneers of multimedia art in Russia. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was a member of Moscow’s art underground and rock scene. He was the founder of the performance groups Parallel Actions (1985–1987) and Theaterpost (1987–1988) and performed a series of actions with the art group World Champions (1988). In 1989, he played the lead role in Oleg Teptsov’s film The Initiated. In 1990, his debut solo exhibition took place at First Gallery (Moscow). In 1995 and 1996, he was a scholarship holder at the Berlin Academy of Arts and in 2004 at the Museum Quarter in Vienna. Since the late 1990s he has explored Christian themes, combining contemporary art, scientific methods, and theological discourse. In 2014, he became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts and in 2022 a corresponding member of the Academy’s Department of New Art Trends.

Chahal Gor

Anna Tereshkina was born in Omsk. She graduated from the Arts Faculty of Omsk State Pedagogical University (2008) and from the School of Engaged Art (St. Petersburg, 2014). She is a member of the sewing cooperative Shvemy, whose projects have been shown at the MediaUdar Festival (Moscow, 2015, 2016) and the 1st Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2017). Together with Anastasia Makarenko she curates Egorka Communal Gallery (St. Petersburg).

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