Metageography. Space - image - action.

This interdisciplinary project is dedicated to Metageography — a concept that came into being in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Metageography is a field of knowledge that lies at the intersection of science, philosophy and art, in its broadest sense.

Metageography considers possibilities, conditions, methods and discourses of geographical thinking and imagination. This project brings together the experiences of geographers and artists from three generations (1960s-2000s). As part of the project, contemporary artworks are accompanied by maps and concepts by geographers.

Since the end of the 1960s, when regular air travel began and the first pictures of Earth from outer space appeared, the concepts of space and time, local and global boundaries, and the categories of “far” and “near,” “inside” and “outside” underwent a radical revision. Now the globalization process is driving a new experience, a modeling and representation of space in which an individual also must reconstruct himself/herself all over again.

For the current London version of the project, that has previously been shown in a different format at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the curators decided to select artworks that reconfigure the post-Soviet landscape and focus on different ways of representing it. The so-called “geographical cartoids” by Boris Rodoman, one of the founders of Metageography are the central point of the exhibition. According to Rodoman: “They reflect a specific landscape formed in our country due to the steadfast features of its political system and economic mode”. Interdisciplinary works by eighteen artists based in Russia are accompanied by pieces by three participants based in the UK, adding further socio-political aspects to this travelling exhibition.

A version of this exhibition was first implemented at the the Kramskoy Museum of Fine Arts in Voronezh and State Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val as a Special Project of the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

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