Algorithms of Cognition

"Unbound Attachments" is a joint project by Lilia Pedak and Yulia Klopova, mother and daughter, in which ceramics and textiles become tools for intergenerational dialogue. The project originally emerged not as an exhibition initiative but as a way to establish communication and make sense of relationships within the family, and ultimately evolved into a full-fledged creative collaboration between two equal authors. The result is panels, objects, and sculptures bearing women's names — they tell stories about fates and feelings on both sides of family ties. Fragments of stories are literally hidden inside the sculptures — viewers can peer inside using an endoscope to see for themselves.

"Minus-Museum" by Valery Grikovsky is a pseudo-scientific art project that interweaves biology, conspiracy theory, superstitions, and naive collecting. Working as a mad scientist-systematizer, the artist creates installations with random artifacts and small objects — from minerals to beetles, from lint balls to roots. The project does not mock science but shows how the scientific method and myth coexist in the mind of a person in an era of change — the evil eye and radioactivity, telekinesis and wave theory of light, tarot divination and gravitational singularity.

In the project "Toolkit," Platon Infante explores the unity of the digital and the material, rejecting the familiar dichotomy of "virtual / real." His objects are familiar things extended into virtual space without distortion: a pencil still draws, paper rustles, sticks tap with a wooden sound. Infante, unlike technological alarmists, sees no threat or mysticism in the digital environment. He regards it as equal to the material zone of artistic action and responsibility. Because of this, his works are often attributed to the trompe l'œil tradition (visual illusion). This is apt only in the sense that the object continues on the other side of materiality and the boundary is invisible to the eye. The installation "Toolkit" from this perspective looks like a manifesto: the creative effort ignores the screen; the author stops thinking of it as a boundary.

Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov are participants of the Venice Biennale, creators of resonant actions and museum projects, who have been working together for over forty years. Their work encompasses painting, graphics, sculpture, video and sound art, kinetic objects, performances, and installations.
The duo's new project "Dust" focuses on the theme of personal memory, loss, and distance. It continues to develop metaphors connecting the domestic with the cosmic, the private with the universal. In the video installation "Observing the Movement of the Earth on a Couch," sunspots become a manifestation of planetary mechanics, while in "Stardust," an old coat releases flashes of constellations into the darkness. For the artists, the important thing is not so much recreating images as finding forms for collectively experiencing pain and fragility.

Apandi Magomedov, one of the most recognizable artists of contemporary Dagestan, will present the project "Delegates of the Landscape." His works combine modernist forms, folk motifs, and images of the Dagestani landscape. They are often created from natural materials: stone, wood, clay, wool, and plants. Magomedov works with landscape not as a backdrop but as an active co-author. His artistic gestures — painted stones in a stream, branches suspended in the wind, paper strips outlining space — do not disturb the natural environment but make its internal processes visible. "Delegates of the Landscape" is a statement about ecological artistic thinking that strives to overcome the boundaries between authorial and folk, individual and traditional, national and universal, natural and artificial. Magomedov offers an alternative to a hierarchically structured perception of space.

As part of the project "3. Brief Tropical Geography," the collective "Flowers of Jondzholi" will present an artistic statement that reimagines coverings, shelters, and workwear as forms of cultural memory. Combining an interest in decorative and applied practices, museum exhibitions, and ceremonial dress, the participants explore transformations of costume in the language of art. The installation is created as a large-scale collage assembled according to the principle of a collective workshop. The works interact, complement, and develop each other, forming a cohesive statement in which individual artistic practices merge into a unified whole.

The art group "Khvoynye" is an atypical art formation for Russian art, existing at the intersection of joint artistic practice, retreat, and performance. Their project at AZ/ART is a recreation of the atmosphere of the annual May "pilgrimage" to the village of Khvoynoe, where artists build communication with art, each other, and nature outside the market system of coordinates, the logic of competition, the struggle for survival, and self-promotion.

Works by participants — Marina Abadzheva, Vitaly Diventsov, Greta Dimaris, Vilgeniy Melnikov, and Serafima Sazhina — become both an artistic statement and a testimony to a shared experience.

Mikhail Rubankov's project is a series of works about a modern shaman's journey to the otherworld — an exploration of how religious symbols, visual clichés, and internet culture coexist in the contemporary imagination. The iron bone in the exhibition title is an important image in the world of shamanic culture — a symbol of resilience in the face of transformations and metamorphoses on the path of mediation between people and spirits.

The artist works in dialogue with conceptualism: the language of instructions, blueprints, and service forms. He constructs spaces where the rational and the esoteric confront each other — for example, a construction glove stretched over nails becomes part of the starry sky. Rubankov creates a space where different cultural codes do not suppress or complement each other but exist in parallel, together forming an image of multilayered reality.

In her new project, Irina Korina continues to work on the boundary of cultural and tactile memory. The exhibition "The Day After Tomorrow Most Likely, But for Some Reason I Can't" is a multi-part installation assembled at the intersection of ritual architecture, Soviet interior heritage, and theatrical space.

Architectural structures often become the central element of the installations. They frequently combine exterior and interior, and the viewer is invited to perform certain actions — climb a staircase, look through a window, enter, open a door. The artist draws inspiration from aesthetic codes regardless of their place in the cultural hierarchy: from a provincial resort of the 2010s to Stalinist metro, from a noble estate to the apartment of an ordinary Soviet citizen, from a building under prolonged renovation to an imperial theater, a flea market, and a tent camp. Along with them, characteristic materials and images from the arsenal of late-Soviet decorative and applied art are integrated into the project: woolen blankets, carpets, whatnots, embossed metalwork, carved eagles, crystal, or as in this exhibition, marquetry (a labor-intensive technique of creating images from veneer of different wood species).

The exhibition space transforms into a theatrical environment where the viewer becomes a participant in a performative action structured according to the logic of a dream: with repetitions and strange conjunctions of images.