News piece about an event, completed as part of the coursework for the «Information Sources in Media Communications» project seminars. The goal was to attend any city event, conduct several interviews, and write a news article based on that material.
The tenth anniversary festival of contemporary art, «Art Wall, ” has opened in St. Petersburg.
From October 2nd to November 8th, residents of the cultural capital can visit the «Supernova» exhibition at the Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art.
The «Art Wall» Festival was established by the Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art in 2011 and was initially an experimental project dedicated to graffiti. Later, the organizers expanded the format, and the festival evolved into a platform for various forms of street art.
This year’s project is titled «Supernova» and unites the works of over 30 artists. The event curators, Vladimir Abikh and Maxim Ima, stated: «A supernova is a powerful cosmic burst that gives birth to new stars. … In the early 2010s, with the emergence of festivals and exhibitions related to street art, many graffiti writers and street artists moved beyond subculture and began mastering new artistic practices.» According to the organizers, the goal of this anniversary exhibition is to showcase the evolution of artists who began their journey with street art. This is why the two exhibition halls feature only the earliest and latest works of the creators.
Our correspondent interviewed Anton Seleznev—a photographer whose work series, «Mimesis, ” is featured in the exhibition. „As a photographer, I don’t offer my own judgment on street art. My job is to document and show that this phenomenon exists. I would be interested to know what prompts a person to paint on a wall. Often it is inappropriate, but easily resolved because you paint over the inscription, and that’s it—it’s gone.“ The exhibition participant also shared that he moved away from the conventional format of photographing people because he wanted viewers to find something of their own in his series of shots: „The shadows cast by the sunlight in my photographs might remind someone of childhood, for instance. People remember lying on a rug at Grandma’s house and looking at patterns. Some might imagine clouds in the sky. You could take my photograph and outline the shapes to create, say, eyes and a nose.“
