Exhibition: “Op Art and Prometheus: Experiments with Optical Art in Kazan”

The exhibition traces the development of optical art and its use in design and light music through projects by Kazan media artists. It includes objects made at Prometheus Student Engineering Bureau, archival material and video. The“Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation for the Support of Audiovisual and Technological Art and the Smena Centre for Contemporary Culture developed the project with support from the Vladimir Potanin Foundation.
The exhibition opens at 12:00 on 8 March. Anastasia Maksimova will lead the first curator tour at 14:00 that day. Further tours take place on Fridays at 15:00. Entry is included with an exhibition ticket.
Tickets
About the exhibition:
From the late 1960s, Prometheus Student Engineering Bureau became a meeting point for researchers experimenting with light, sound and technology in art. Kazan festivals and conferences hosted intense debates: would artists still be needed in an age of algorithms and computers, and could creativity itself be programmed? The bureau collected Soviet and international books, journals and exhibition catalogues, corresponded with colleagues abroad and created displays introducing new artistic movements.
Inspired by Op artists including Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley and Jesús Rafael Soto, the engineers and artists around Bulat Galeev applied Op-art principles to moving stencils and light-shaping devices. Patterns cut into Plexiglas, foil, metal and transparent film generated dynamic light-music compositions. The works in the exhibition layer ornaments, reflections, lines and geometric forms to create depth and shifting perspective.
Optical illusions arise from the interaction between the eye and the brain. Contrasts of light and shade and intense colour can disrupt that process and create a false sense of movement or depth. Material from the “Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation shows both direct references to Western Op art and new uses of its geometric language.
The bureau’s publication covers and posters also adopted recognisable Op-art forms. They suggested the logic of algorithms, information systems and the space age, placing perception and process ahead of a fixed object. These ideas soon entered public-space design and fashion. In today’s rapidly changing visual culture, Op art again offers tools for thinking about how people interact with images.
Kazan light-music practice of the 1960s–1980s combined methods from many artistic and technical movements, from the avant-garde and kinetic art to cybernetics and algorithmic programming. The exhibition brings together objects, archival material and videos that reveal the relationship between light music and Op art, a movement excluded from official Soviet culture during the era of Socialist Realism.
Geometric forms, colour relationships and illusory perspective recur throughout the work of Kazan light-music artists. The exhibition follows their search for an independent visual language, distinguishing borrowed techniques from original developments. It also considers how their experiments later shaped design and art.
Curator: Anastasia Maksimova, director of the “Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation for the Support of Audiovisual and Technological Art.