Like Siberia, the Ural region gives the impression of being a state within a state. It is a postindustrial, abandoned territory: the place of large-scale experiments in architecture, nuclear power, and heavy industry. I was told that giants live here, three-meter-tall people adapted to survival in the local conditions. These myths echo the life and work of the writer and revolutionary Pavel Bazhov (1879–1950), who collected Ural folklore. Many local contemporary artists work to create or revive alternative mythologies.

The city of Chelyabinsk is known for its monument to the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, Igor Kurchatov (1903–1960); the impressive building of the South Ural State University; Chelyabinsk State Museum of Fine Arts; the State Historical Museum of Southern Urals; and the city’s only contemporary art gallery, OkNo. The two-hundred-and-fifty-year history of Chelyabinsk is marked by the nuclear disaster that took place at the Mayak Chemical Combine in 1957; the tragic history of Stalinist labor camps; the mass graves of Volga German forced laborers from the local factories; and the now famous Chelyabinsk meteor that fell in the vicinity of the city in 2013. The oldest bust of Lenin in Russia stands in a city square.

My two-day program was organized by Svetlana Shlyapnikova, director of OkNo Gallery, which is the heart of the local art scene. The gallery, which shares a building with a small experimental theater studio, is relatively small, yet its empathetic management and support draws many local artists. There I got acquainted with talented eighteen-year-old Vlad Mikhel; sixty-year-old engineer and designer Nikolai Panafidin, who makes kinetic sculptures in his free time; and artist Anastasia Bogomolova, who works with family archives and the region’s traumatic history. We spoke about what it means to be an artist and practice art in the absence of institutional support. I occasionally recall fragments of these conversations.

During my trips to Siberia and Chelyabinsk, I had already heard favorable reviews of Yekaterinburg, whose active art scene is powered by the local branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (NCCA). Since 2011, the center has hosted the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art under the leadership of its director, Alisa Prudnikova.

Yekaterinburg is a pretty city with singing fountains, unique constructivist architecture, and a famous dumpling plant. It has a number of cultural institutions, including the Yeltsin Center, the aforementioned Ural Branch of the NCCA, the Metenkov House Museum of Photography, the Cultural Transit Foundation, and the B.U. Kashkin Museum. Curiously enough, artists work in these organizations. For example, Sergei Rozhin and Sergei Poteryaev are on the staff of the Cultural Transit Foundation. The latter is also a curator at Metenkov House, while Vladimir Seleznyov is a curator at NCCA. These three artists know and support each other: during our meetings, each of them recommended that I take a look at the others’ work. Many artists work in several different media at once: Rozhin engages in visual art, music, and street art, while Sasha Saltanova, who works under various pseudonyms, makes interventions in public spaces and engages in video and light art.

The NCCA provides artists with studios, where one can meet the well-known street artist Timofey Radya and the group Where Dogs Run (or simply The Dogs, as they are called here), whose five members examine the vast territory between science and art. In addition, Yekaterinburg is the self-proclaimed capital of street art, with such artists as Slava PTRK, the art group ZLYE, and the authoritative festival Stenograffia.

I promised myself that I would return to this city one day to pursue my conversation with remarkable artist and human being Sergey Laushkin, and to meet the artist Vladimir Zhukov, who leads a solitary life outside the city limits.