UrFU B.U.Kashkin Museum Collection in New York

02:34, February 16, 2013

Art works by Bukashkin (Evgeny Malakhin) and Oleg Elovoy are exhibited in the Brooklyn gallery "The Active Space"

The exhibition of UrFU B.U.Kashkin Museum collection in New York was organized by an American-Russian project "BRURAL: Peripheral Vision".  The project has been prepared for a year by the Museum Curator Daria Kostina and Irina Danilova - a Brooklyn artist, curator and founder of the art organization "Project 59, Inc". The exhibition was opened on 18 January in the most creative part of Brooklyn - Bushwick - and gathered a great number of guests from the professional artistic community and those who are interested in modern art.

The exhibition "BRURAL: Peripheral Vision" has become the second in "BRURAL" series, held as a joint partnership project of artists and curators from the Urals and Brooklyn, devoted to the transformation of provincial areas into the centres of modern art.

The main topic explored at the Brooklyn exhibition is the characteristic aspects of artists who have chosen alternative ways both in art and in life.  All seven participants of the project have different national, social and cultural background, but all of them reveal something crucial about the concept of periphery, and many of them, for various reasons, stand on the sidelines of the modern art-scene.

For the first time in the USA the exhibition showed "moral-chopping boards" by Bukashkin (1938 - 2005), which he created together with the society "Kartinnik" in the 1990s, and a wonderful interview video record, made by V.Malyshev.  There are two joint photo series "Relocation of an Artist" (2001) and "Winter Conservation" (1993) by Oleg Elovoy (1967 -2001), a poet and a performer, who is truly significant for the Ural region, and Dmitry Kunilov, a photographer.

"BRURAL: Peripheral Vision" also includes the works by a unique Ukrainian artist Vladimir Danilov, exploring the possibilities of visual perception of the impossible 3D space, and John Kudryavtsev - a brilliant art-hero from Vladivostok, who has turned his house into one big installation. There were also three Brooklyn artists.  One of them - Alberto Burzstyn - professor of school psychology at Brooklyn College is an author of original art installations, created out of used or found objects. Two other project participants are Eric Pesso, a programmer, who makes large-scale mathematically precise wooden sculptures, and a poet Iris Berman -  the author of amazing colourful collages.

The most exciting part of the exhibition were poetry readings dedicated to the memory of Iris Berman, recently deceased.  Some of Iris's friend only lately have found out that she was not only a poet, but also an artist.  The poetry readings were organized by Roxanne Hoffman, the founder of a small Brooklyn publishing house "POETSWEARPRADA", and were a great success.

Daria Kostina, who has recently arrived from New York, told about the project at the opening of a new session of "Half-Open Mondays" - a lecture and discussion club, organised by UrFU Department of Culture and Arts and the National Center for Contemporary Arts.  Her speech "Periphery: artistic and curator's look out of /at it" provoked a lively discussion about the role of the geographical and symbolical periphery in the modern art process.

The exhibition "BRURAL: Peripheral Vision" will last till 24 February 2013.

Evgeniy Malakhin (known as Old Man Bukashkin - Starik Bukashkin, or B.U.Kashkin, 1938 - 2005) was an artist and poet from Ekaterinburg, remembered for his bohemian but simplistic lifestyle, short aphoristic verse and extravagant street art. An exhibition of the Bukashkin Museum was established at UrFU Institute of Humanities and Arts in 2008, containing lots of artifacts created by artist.