The second region I visited was the Northwest Federal District. As expected, it was a lot easier to look for art in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, and Petrozavodsk than in Cherkessk or Nalchik.

Although I had never been to Kaliningrad before, it felt like a homecoming in a way. The city is home to the wonderful Baltic Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts, directed by Elena Tsvetaeva and Evgeny Umansky. For almost 15 years, the center has promoted cross-cultural ties in the Baltic region, including Northern Europe and the new European countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The role of NCCA branches in the Russian regions is a subject in its own right: they literally shape the cultural life of cities and entire regions. As a rule, they are run by a group of art enthusiasts and close friends that manage to organize exhibitions and festivals, despite a chronic shortage of money. Sometimes, as in the case of NCCA Kaliningrad, they even make forays into completely new formats such as Sound Around, the first Russian festival of sound art. A small sentimental aside: I first met Elena Tsvetaeva when I came to work at NCCA Moscow at the age of 18, and so my trip to Kaliningrad was like a visit to the home of close friends. This is also why I was so eager to take a look at the former German barracks and Kronprinz Tower, which have been put at NCCA’s disposal and whose reconstruction will hopefully be completed soon with the help of God or the assistance of the city government.

Two intense days in Kaliningrad were marked by a series of enjoyable meetings and new discoveries. Dmitry Bulatov, the leading proponent of science art in Russia, and Alexey Chebykin have made a new project called Access Point (2016) based on the principle of anamorphosis. Dmitry presented me with the second volume of his anthology Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age (2013). Yuri Vasiliev showed me both new and long-forgotten video works on the theme of real and phantom (contrived) Russianness. Danil Akimov, the ideologist and organizer of Sound Around, demonstrated his ingenious works based on the juxtaposition of visual and auditory experiences. Although he spends more time promoting others than himself, NCCA art director Evgeny Umansky, a former oceanologist and long-time artist (many still remember his projects with the group San Donato), finally agreed to show me his latest works and those by San Donato group.

My first day in Kaliningrad began with Evgeny showing me old exhibition catalogs that NCCA Kaliningrad made in its early days. They are milestones in the history of contemporary Russian art. On the second day, I visited the Vorota Art Platform, where I met with very young artists. Many of them, such as Anton Zabrodin, are going through a traumatic rupture with traditional photography, trying to understand its new roles and formats. One of my strongest purely photographic impressions of recent times came from seeing Alexander Matveev’s black-and-white works. They are more powerful and expressive than the photographs of Michael Kenna (photo curators take note!).

Later, I met Eugenia Lapteva, a member of Gentle Women group, which is apparently the only Russian group to engage in radical female performances. This encounter concluded my Kaliningrad cycle: for the nth time, I saw St. Petersburg-based curator Pyotr Bely who was opening his exhibition “Signal”, which included an entertaining performance from Eugenia, which involved “diving” into a stack of car tires. No other recent exhibition has made such a big impression on artists as Bely’s curatorial project Signal: The Art of the Real (2014), first produced for Manifesta, in which participants made works with artifacts found in the abandoned plant’s rooms and workshops.

Elena Tsvetaeva then took me to the village of Yantarny on the cold Baltic Sea, where we sat for three hours on the shore discussing how it came about that we are all working in contemporary art. Elena has the best story of all, which took place when she and Evgeny Umansky first came to Moscow to ask for government support for the legendary graphic art biennale (believe it or not, she managed to bring Richard Serra’s drawings to Russia in 1996!). Going from one ministry department to another, they found themselves in the office of Leonid Bazhanov, head of the Fine Art Department, which had a “dream team” at the time. One of its staff members was Olga Lopukhova, who shocked the ministry with her tutu, bald head, and huge earrings. When Elena and Evgeny saw her, they immediately understood they had come to the right place. Bazhanov supported the biennale and soon began to develop the NCCA regional network, which has become the pride and glory of the organization. Let me take this opportunity to extend my sincerest thanks to Leonid Bazhanov!