Yekaterinburg Hosts Finale of Art Project on Modern Housing Architecture
On January 11, the exhibition «Ideal Forms and Living Reality» concluded at the Yeltsin Center, implemented by the Yandex Realty service and the contemporary art gallery PENNLAB Gallery. The exhibition in Yekaterinburg was the culmination of the entire project, which had visited Moscow and St. Petersburg the year before.
Background and Everyday Life as a Stage for Living
The goal of the project «Ideal Forms and Living Reality» was to invite artists to reinterpret the architecture of modern housing. Often unconsciously, we see the new urban landscape only as an everyday background: apartments, parking lots, windows, elevators, floors, balconies, without noticing the emergence of a genuine architectural phenomenon of our time. Together with Ural, Moscow, and St. Petersburg authors, visitors to the exhibition were given the opportunity to examine the elements and composition of the urban landscape of the largest cities—Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg—and trace how the familiar becomes a stage for life.
Below, you will learn how it happened and how art and business together strive to take a new look at contemporary architecture—at the home simultaneously as a place for living and a creative metaphor.
A Person with a Camera, or the Ural View on the Modern City
Over 3,000 Yekaterinburg residents and visitors to the Ural capital managed to attend the final exhibition of the project «Ideal Forms and Living Reality» at the Yeltsin Center. Particularly interesting to visitors might have been the local authors and their authentic view on the urban landscape and modern residential buildings of Yekaterinburg.
Fyodor Telkov and His «Ideal City»
Fyodor Telkov is a photographer and researcher of the anthropological and cultural diversity of the Urals and Russia. The focus of his work is the life of representatives of indigenous peoples, traditional communities in the era of globalization. Among the themes are the transition from industrial to post-industrial society, the relationship between humans and the environment.
In the project «Ideal Forms and Living Reality,» Fyodor Telkov presented his own view on architecture and the urban landscape. The artist turned rooms in new-build apartments into large camera obscuras. Thus, the external architecture of the building is projected onto the empty walls of the apartments, connecting the external and internal. His «ideal city» is a living optical experience that visualizes the search for harmony in urban space.
Fyodor Telkov«s »Ideal City« is an homage to the veduta genre painting from the turn of the 15th–16th centuries, and to the utopian concept described by Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, and Francis Bacon. Interestingly, the roots of the doctrine go back to antiquity, from Plato and his »Dialogues,« but the »ideal city« is still relevant today, for example in the concept of the »15-minute city,« which is actively being implemented in modern residential complexes.
Sergey Gonchar and His «Signal»
Sergey Gonchar is a Ural author who considers photography as a medium of memory and a form of social gesture. In his area of interest is the analysis: how through photography familiar behavior models appear, how unique personal experience transforms into a collective image. The author explores the illusoriness of the photographic image and its role in shaping ideas about closeness, environment, and everyday life. He implemented his concept in the series of works «Signal,» which he presented at the exhibition «Ideal Forms and Living Reality.»
His focus is a certain route of the home. In Sergey Gonchar«s camera lens, the signal systems of residential complexes were captured: partitions, lighting, cameras, intercoms, navigation, signal lights. All these elements set routes, fix access points, and movement boundaries. »Signals« form their own visual presence and influence how a person interacts with architecture in daily life.
Anya Marchenkova and Her «Air»
Anya Marchenkova is an artist who works primarily with installation and photography, and for her, photography is a method of research. In her practice, Anya develops themes of ecological and cultural landscape, urban space, and architecture.
Her concept «Air» refers to the principles of natural philosophy—a direction that originated in Ancient Greece, and today embodied in the metaphor of technology as an extension of nature. The modern home in Anya Marchenkova«s works is a »machine for living.« Here, the ventilation system becomes a mediator between parts of a large organism. Fresh air reaches residents through galvanized channels and fans, turning into a metaphor for the »gift of nature« within technical infrastructure.
Experience of the Two Capitals: Moscow and St. Petersburg in Frame
In addition to Ural authors, Yandex Realty and PENNLAB Gallery at the exhibition in the Yeltsin Center also presented works from previous stages of the project—from Moscow and St. Petersburg. The experience of the two capitals is interesting to compare with the Ural works, which simultaneously tell about the same thing, but in a different photographic language.
Among the capital authors, for example, is the exhibition curator Vladislav Yefimov—an artist, photographer, laureate of numerous awards, whose works are in the collections of the State Russian Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and others.
In the project, Vladislav Yefimov presented the work «Time of Joy.» Its title refers to the 1967 comedy by Jacques Tati «Play Time» (literally «Time of Entertainment»). And if in the film by the cinema classic, the frame captures the journey of the characters through Paris—a city of skyscrapers and labyrinths, in the lens of the photography classic Vladislav Yefimov—it«s a journey through the world of modern architecture in Moscow.
Also in Yekaterinburg, works by such capital authors as Yelena Karatun, Alexey Korsi, Anastasia Litvinova, Yuri Palmin, Olya Pegova, Anastasia Tsaider were presented. At the exhibition, visitors could see works by artists from St. Petersburg—concepts by Alexander Verevkin, Igor Yelukov, and Polina Timofeyeva.
«Stop, Moment,» or How Art and Business United for a New Artistic Statement
The project «Ideal Forms and Living Reality» saw the light in 2024 and opened its doors for the first time in Moscow at the HSE ART GALLERY. The next point on the artistic route was St. Petersburg: here the exhibition took place at «Sevcable Port.»
The final stage was in Yekaterinburg, at the Yeltsin Center. It became the assembly point for all the experience of the project. In the frame, different cities, scales, and materials are gathered, but one thing remained unified—attention to how a person lives within new architecture, a new urban landscape.
And despite the fact that the camera lens captured projects by major developers (for example, Brusnika, Praktika, RSG-Akademicheskoye, and TEN Development), which have long been familiar to buyers and those interested in real estate, the goal of the project was not to advertise or sell, but to make a new statement in art.
— As a service and business, we do help people buy real estate, sell it, but in the project «Ideal Forms and Living Reality,» the focus was on something else. Together with the artists, we wanted to see new details of the environment and city around us through the prism of art: signals, technologies, and optical effects, reflections. We wanted to capture and stop time in the metropolis, to capture the modern urban landscape, while it has not yet ceased to be part of modernity. At all stages of the project, through the unique view of each author, we tried to go beyond everyday life, to show how the familiar, background can become a stage for life. Yekaterinburg became the logical completion of this project. This is a city of contrast, where skyscrapers coexist with wooden houses in the Neo-Russian style, merchant estates, and constructivist Uralmash. Yekaterinburg is a city of architectural experiments, and it is precisely modern architectural projects and artistic experiments that we wanted to show in our project. We are grateful to partners and authors for this dialogue with art and are happy to summarize the project—at least offline—right in the Urals, — summarizes the project Yevgeny Belokurov, commercial director of Yandex Realty.
