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A collective of artists, a gallery and a movement, APTART was a series of self organised ‘anti-shows’ that took place in a private apartment and outdoor spaces in Moscow between 1982 and 1984. These covert and anarchic actions, which soon came into conflict with the Soviet authorities, represent a collective attempt to rethink the politics of exhibition-making and the practice of making public in the absence of a public sphere.
Coinciding with the launch of this latest publication in the Exhibition Histories series, join artists Vadim Zakharov and Nikita Alekseev and art historian Margarita Tupitsyn as they revisit APTART as an artistic and political project.
In association with Afterall and supported by narrative projects, London and Galerie Iragui, Moscow.
Nikita Alekseev (born 1953 in Moscow, Russia) is an artist and writer currently based in Moscow. After contributing to the early Collective Actions group interventions, Alekseev organised the APTART exhibitions that predominantly took place in his apartment between 1982–84. He is currently represented by Galerie Iragui, Moscow and has work collected by the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts Collections, Moscow, Centre Pompidou, State Museum of Modern Art, Thessaloniki, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Multi-Media Art Museum, Moscow and the Ekaterina Foundation, Moscow amongst others.
Margarita Tupitsyn is an independent scholar, curator and critic. From 1981-83, she was the curator at the Contemporary Russian Art Center of America, New York, where she organised the first exhibitions of Moscow Conceptualism, amongst them ‘Russian New Wave’ (1982). She has written art criticism for Flash Art, Artforum and Art in America, and is the author of many books, including Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present (Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1989), Malevich and Film (Yale University Press, 2002), Against Kandisnsky (Hatje Cantz, 2006), Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism (Tate Publishing, 2009) and Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992 (Yale University Press, 2017) Tupitsyn curated the Russian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
Vadim Zakharov (born 1959 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan) is an artist, editor, archivist and historian of avant-garde Russian art. He is a founding member of The Moscow Conceptualism group of artists active from the late 1970s, and was a participant of the APTART Gallery exhibitions (1982–1983). His work has been widely exhibited internationally. He was awarded the Innovation and the Kandinsky art prizes, and he has shown at the Russian pavilion in the 2013 55th Venice Biennale. Zahkarov is a graduate of the Moscow State Teachers Training Institute. He lives and works between Moscow and Berlin.
Thu 21 & Fri 22 Sep 2017
8pm | £20/ £15 concs
Renowned Russian artist Vadim Zakharov presents an evening of exhilarating and subversive performance.
