Exhibition organisers:
About the exhibition:
The exhibition connects experimental projects in book, type and sound design with kinetic and synaesthetic art during the Thaw. Its protagonists are scientists, typographers, designers and artists who pushed both old and new media to their limits. They treated culture and science as open, collaborative fields and maintained networks across and beyond the USSR. Their decentralised methods, shared responsibility and distributed work feel strikingly contemporary.
The exhibition also speaks to the present. Informal networks help artistic and scientific thought withstand pressure and produce resilient forms of collaboration. “O-Network” brings together several projects developed by the “Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation for the Support of Audiovisual and Technological Art and the Voznesensky Centre’s Thaw Research Centre.
At the centre is Prometheus Student Engineering Bureau. Founded in 1962 in the Radio Engineering Department of the Kazan Aviation Institute, it brought together artists and physicists around Bulat Galeev, a physicist and theorist of aesthetics and media. Their work in light music, art, architecture and design made them pioneers of Soviet media and video art.
Close observation, cultural openness and carefully maintained friendships guided Prometheus and the exhibition’s other protagonists. Solomon Telingater designed a “unified” alphabet intended to connect European cultures. The editors of Foreign Literature assembled an international community of writers and thinkers inspired by the possibilities of the space age.
These networks were repeatedly tested and sometimes broken. Artist and designer Yuri Sobolev, another central figure in the project, devoted his work to finding unexpected gaps and connections.
“O-Network” reveals links between practices that are usually treated as separate. Its central proposition is simple: new ideas often emerge through unexpected connections.
For the exhibition, musicians and artists from Yekaterinburg and Kazan created an album of audiovisual works with three analogue light-music instruments: “Crystal” (1965), “Kaleidophone-36” (1986) and the “Dawn” console (1986). The works were made during the 2023 laboratory “The Experiment Promises to Become Art” at the archive of the “Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation.
Project curator: Kirill Mayevsky
Curators of exhibition sections: Dmitry Bezuglov, Rustam Gabbasov, Kirill Mayevsky, Anastasia Maksimova, Anna Romanova, Marina Sokolovskaya, Svetlana Usoltseva
Co-organizers of the laboratory: Bureau “Tesnota”
Laboratory participants: Anton Elfilter, Artyom Dultsev (metra.vestlud), Alexander Efimov (Nienvox), Marina Kareva (tangerrriiiine), Alina Karimova (Holofonote), Nadya Kimelyar, Anton Mironov (Antrone), Ekaterina Popova (Piromantika), Ruslan Tagirov (INBOX), Ivan Trishin, Kirill Chernev (21 Outside) Timofey Sharagin (“Loud Fish”)
Architecture and exhibition design: Anna Naumova, Kirill Blagodatskikh
The exhibition includes material from the “Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation, Galeev Gallery, the Thaw Research Centre and the Voznesensky Centre, the Konstantin Vasiliev Museum, the Irbit State Museum of Fine Arts, the United Museum of Writers of the Urals, Foreign Literature and Ural Pathfinder magazines, the V. G. Belinsky Sverdlovsk Regional Universal Scientific Library, family archives and private collections.
Exhibition partner: bar “Gem”.
