Literal Connections

Project Creators

Director General of AZ Museum and AZ/ART Center for Contemporary Art / Natalia Opaleva
Curator / Alexander Dashevsky
Exhibition Architecture / PSCulture Bureau and Yulia Napolova


On March 12, the exhibition by Anatoly Belkin "Literal Connections" opened at the AZ/ART Center for Contemporary Art. The exhibition features over 70 paintings, graphic works, and sculptures by the artist from the collections of AZ Museum and private collections. The exhibition is dedicated to Belkin's exploration of the meaning-laden gap between the artist's performative, behavioral drawing and one of the central themes of his art — the erosion of the cultural layer, the fragmentation of memory. The project curator is art historian Alexander Dashevsky.

Anatoly Belkin is an artist, cultural impresario, mystifier, participant in the first exhibitions of unofficial art in Leningrad in the 1970s, and founder of the St. Petersburg magazines "Sobaka.ru" and "Veshch.doc." Today, his works are held in the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other museums around the world. Since the late 1980s, the artist's solo exhibitions have been held in galleries in New York, Paris, London, and Berlin, and in 2004, Belkin's exhibition "Gold of the Swamps," a grandiose project about a fictional "swamp civilization," became a breakthrough for contemporary Russian art at the Hermitage. However, in Moscow, throughout the artist's career, his exhibition was held only once — in 2006 at the Triumph Gallery, where the "Gold of the Swamps" project was again shown in collaboration with the Hermitage.

Almost 20 years later, at his second Moscow exhibition "Literal Connections," Belkin will appear to the viewer not only as a master of visual play and mystification but also as a researcher of history, capturing meanings and forms slipping into the past.

The exhibition includes graphic works from the "Alphabet" series, collages, bronze sculpture, and paintings. Several works by the artist, including the sculpture dedicated to Henry David Thoreau, "The Bronze Age," and the collage "Measure Seven Times, Cut Once" about the delicate treatment of revolutionary art of the past, are being shown to the public for the first time.

Natalia Opaleva, Director General of AZ Museum and AZ/ART Center:

"I think many will agree with me: Anatoly Belkin is a legendary figure for St. Petersburg; you can't describe him in just a few words. To explain the Belkin phenomenon, one must recall many things — for example, his apartment-studio, hung not only with his own works but even more with works by artists he was friends with and valued. Who hasn't visited his home — it's a pity there's no guest book! One must also recall the magazine 'Sobaka' he founded, of which Anatoly was editor-in-chief from 1999 to 2005. And also the television series 'Belkin's Tales' about Russian art..."

The exhibition architecture, created by PSCulture Bureau and Yulia Napolova, emphasizes the research and analytical nature of the project: the exhibition space with diagonal corridors, projections, and niches reminds the viewer of museum displays and containers for storing valuable artifacts, allowing a fresh look at Belkin's work.

The "Literal Connections" exhibition is divided into several thematic sections, each representing a form of preserving historical memory and transmitting cultural code: "Writing," "Architecture," "Objects and Characters," and "Album."

The "Writing" section includes works dedicated to linguistic difficulties: fragmentary speech, illegibility, poor preservation, loss of language, and incomprehensibility of content. It also includes Belkin's graphic series "Alphabet" — 33 pages of a primer transformed by the artist into a space of personal associations. "Architecture" reflects Belkin's interest in order and structure — or rather, in their destruction and violation. This section gathers ruins and "fragments" that a St. Petersburg native could not remain indifferent to. The "Objects and Characters" section presents Belkin's collages made from objects of material culture — scraps of fabric, recipe books, splinters, and other seemingly mundane trifles. The artist seems to fish them out of the stream of time and place them on canvases. The "Album" section is dedicated to old photographs that have outlived their time and lost their connection to place but retain a link to the past. The exhibition concludes with an archive-library section where visitors can explore books, interviews, and publications about Anatoly Belkin and watch his video interviews.

Alexander Dashevsky, exhibition curator:

"The figure of Anatoly Pavlovich Belkin seems changeable and contradictory: from one angle, he appears as a virtuoso showrunner, an amazing social communicator, one of the figures centering St. Petersburg's bohemia for half a century. From another angle — an artist sensitively responding to the erosion of cultural space. From a third — a tireless mocking storyteller, turning history into stories, binding the unraveling world with threads of cheerful narrative, filling gaping voids and places of loss with the echo of his spirited verbal escapades. This exhibition is an attempt to show the tense, deliberate, and logical connections between Belkin's sub-personalities, to understand the structure of his artistic language."

The project includes guided tours, original children's programs, publication of a guidebook-brochure, and release of souvenir products.

The exhibition will run until May 12, 2025. Admission is charged; the full ticket price is 400 rubles. The reduced ticket price is 200 rubles. On Mondays, admission is free for all visitors.

Please note that on the first Monday of each month, the space is closed for a technical day.