“Ah, vernissage, ah, vernissage! What a portrait, what a landscape!”
And for us — what a notebook! What a collage! This is how the defenses of student works from the Contemporary Art course, led by Olga Goryacheva @olga_setdesign, took place — a real vernissage!
Through the efforts of the school, graduates, and lecturers, an ordinary dining room at our Spring School 🎒 was transformed into an exhibition hall. Curtain rods were specially attached to the walls, with invisible thin threads hanging from them, and the artworks were then mounted on these threads.
Olga’s students began preparing their projects — their artistic statements — already by the second or third class of the course, once they had mastered an understanding of the artistic language of different styles.
It helped greatly that two professionals with specialized education joined the course, along with four more participants who draw regularly and are searching for their own style. In the end, only three students presented their works for defense — those whose projects formed a complete creative statement, which they presented during their defenses.
Irina Ivanova @ivanovarin, using delicate black lines, created astonishing people, animals, and angels. For many years, she had been drawing them in small notebooks, and now they became separate characters — eight friends of the author, who had helped her in childhood and now looked directly into the viewer’s face. In a small mirror placed at the center of the composition, the viewer saw themselves, surrounded by these magical, kind beings.
Nastya Balushkina @an_baloo, a professional artist, had long been working on the project “On the Duty to Remember — On the Desire to Forget.” In it, she turns to the theme of searching for identity between a world left in the past — transmitted through the family way of life absorbed in childhood from her grandmother and mother — and the search for a new identity, into which the old experience no longer fits and requires rethinking, even when it is “stitched in,” “imprinted” in memory through the fabric of her mother’s dress, and “woven in” through the threads of her grandmother’s knitting.
The exhibits can be interacted with: touching the fabrics of the dresses, running fingers through the soft threads, braiding them into plaits…
Yulia Popova @psypopovajul chose the theme of her profession for her course project in the exhibition — a psychologist’s work with trauma. She prepared a triptych in the technique of appliqué and collage, presenting the transformation of three painful emotions: fear, shame, and constraint, which become fixed in the “memory of the body” and interfere with movement, breathing, and life. Each part of the triptych shows the process of liberation from a traumatic emotion, while the collage technique creates a sense of the multidimensionality of transformation.
There were enough viewers for a proper mini-exhibition, and everyone moved freely around the hall, following the stories of the course graduates — the authors of the exhibition — asking questions, interacting with the objects, and sharing their impressions.
Margarita Lavrentieva @Rita_lavr, a graduate in Cultural Anthropology from King’s College London and an independent expert of the Defense Committee, greatly helped everyone understand the essence of the projects and their connection to the conceptual frameworks and current trends of contemporary art.
This was our first — and wonderful! — experience of defending Course Projects at Nomadic University in the form of a vernissage. Everyone absolutely loved it!
We very much hope that we will have more courses like this — across different fields of culture and art!
