Third ear

Project Creators

Founder of AZ/ART Center for Contemporary Art / Natalia Opaleva
Curator / Alexander Dashevsky
Exhibition Architecture / [MISH] studio (Misha Maslov, Marina Artamonycheva)

On September 18, 2024, the exhibition "The Third Ear" opened at the AZ/ART Center for Contemporary Art. Curator and art historian Alexander Dashevsky presented a project about how music penetrates the life of contemporary people and how immaterial sound takes on material forms. In this way, AZ/ART continues the conversation about music that began this summer with the Center's first exhibition, "Unexpected Intersections."

In the AZ/ART space, visitors can see works by contemporary artists and Soviet nonconformists from the AZ Museum collection and private collections: Zhenya Sharvina, Andrei Rudyev, Igor Makarevich, Vladimir Nemukhin, Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Petr Shvetsov, Boris Kozakov, Marina Alekseeva, Sergei Denikin, and other artists.

The exhibition fills the entire AZ/ART space, starting from the lobby and two exhibition halls and ending with the shop, where several video works by Boris Kazakov are displayed. The exhibition architecture was designed by the architectural bureau [MISH], founded by Misha Maslov.

The exhibition "The Third Ear" explores questions of sound and sonority, namely the reflection of musical tastes and hierarchies in contemporary art. Specially for the exhibition, one of the leading contemporary artists, Vitaly Pushnitsky, created a metaphorical portrait of John Cage. Andrei Rudyev, who combines images of Soviet and Western everyday life in his work, presents nineteen paintings at the exhibition. Rudyev's works are dedicated to the 1980s and 1990s, when Soviet music lovers avidly listened to forbidden Western music and secretly worshipped its key heroes — the bands Kiss, Beatles, The Doors, David Bowie, and electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk. Andrei Rudyev, whose formative years fell in the late 80s and early 90s, constantly returns to the pivotal moment of his life when he decided to become an artist and reinterprets it in visual works.

St. Petersburg artist Vladimir Kustov has been engaged in contemporary art since the early 80s. His practice includes such mediums as performance, cinema, painting, photography, literature, installation, and video. The exhibition shows two installations by Vladimir Kustov that tell about one of his main passions — collecting vinyl records. One of the installations is dedicated to the "curse of the ninth symphony," associated with Ludwig van Beethoven.

A significant part of the exhibition is occupied by video works: video art by rising star of the Moscow scene Zhenya Sharvina, Boris Kazakov, who continues to explore the aesthetics of parallel cinema, and renowned artist Marina Alekseeva, who works in the genre of chamber installation.

Classics of nonconformism represented by Vladimir Nemukhin and Mikhail Shemyakin complement the exhibition with works paying homage to Johann Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky.

Specially for the exhibition "The Third Ear," Katya Isaeva recorded two vinyl records that can be listened to in the AZ/ART space — "Voices of Extinct Birds" and "Sounds of Taiwan."

The public program of the project will open on September 25 with a lecture by journalist, writer, and music producer Alexander Kushnir, "Labyrinths of Tape Recorder Culture," inspired by the book "100 Magnetic Albums of Soviet Rock." Throughout the exhibition, a series of events for teenagers and children will take place. The project will also be accompanied by curator tours by Alexander Dashevsky. The first tour will take place on the opening day of the exhibition — September 18 at 7:00 PM.

Alexander Dashevsky, exhibition curator:
"The Third Ear is a phantasmagoric exhibition structured as a journey from the source of sound to the brain through the external auditory canal, eardrum, and cochlear nerve. This journey will immerse us in an exploration of the social nature of music. How do the sounds we hear around us affect our consciousness? At the same time, the exposition is a drift of consciousness of the exhibition's lyrical hero, trying to fall asleep to the sounds of a radio receiver. The melody playing from it carries his tired soul through situations and places where acoustic culture penetrated his life."


The exhibition will run until November 4, 2024. Admission is charged; the full ticket price is 400 rubles. The reduced ticket price is 200 rubles. On Mondays, admission to the museum is free for all visitors.