Art and the city - feeling the urban and suburban in modern Russia

Описание: (24 Nov 2019) LEAD IN
Beyond the iconic vistas Moscow's suburbs are inspiring a new generation of artists.
Now an massive pan-city project is celebrating the art inspired by everyday life in the Russian capital.  

STORY-LINE:
As sleet falls on a cold November day, communist-era apartment blocks dominating Moscow's suburban skyline look bleak and forbidding.  
But it's precisely these sprawling city outskirts that are the focus of a major international art exhibition, just opened in the Russian capital.
'Beyond the Centre' is staging art events across Moscow's vast urban space starting this fall and culminating in March 2020.
One of the featured artists, Pasmur Rachuiko, paints the Russia he sees everyday.
"All these characters are from my personal world; in fact, they live in your daily routine. When you live in Russia, you just scroll through your Facebook feed, all this symbolic environment is all around you" he says.
Hailing from southern Russia, self-taught painter Rachuiko offers an extreme outsider's view of Moscow reality.
Burka-clad figures, policemen and wolves pose in the suburbs, gangsters have angels' wings and young women carrying AK-47 rifles stare out of his canvases.
Pasmur depicts himself as 'everyman' amongst this cast of new Russian archetypes.  
The paintings sparked public criticism on social media and disapproval from Moscow's culture department.
But Pasmur has support from the liberal arts establishment
Simon Mraz, director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow, and curator of the exhibition, says to find the real Moscow you have to go outside the centre to where most of the city's 12.6 million people live.
"They all come to Moscow with some dreams, facing struggles and hoping for a better future. But they will not find it, all these people can impossibly realise the future in Red Square, definitely not in the Kremlin, they will never live there," says Mraz.
The city outskirts span its urban history - from 'sleeping' districts built by Soviet town planners to new residential areas strung around its boundary.
A United Nations (UN) report this year concluded that despite steep population decline in Russia, Moscow is growing, fuelled by a steady influx of people in search of jobs and a better life.
Modern Russia is reflected in the capital, a demographic with complex socio-economic layers, whose ethnic mix covers the entire former Soviet space.
In its broad scope 'Beyond the Centre' offers an investigation rather than a complete portrait of Moscow.
It shows a capital city still in formation, experiencing the huge challenges facing Russia in the 21st century.
Urban renewal hasn't yet reached Lyublino, a working-class suburb.
Here in a dilapidated industrial zone, the 'Museum of Industrial Culture' houses a private collection of discarded objects, amassed by former auto engineer Lev Zheleznyov.
It's a social history of over 70 years of communism, told though ordinary things people recognise from a shared past.
"This is a museum of memory. Therefore, people come not even for information on an object because not everyone is interested in how many lamps a receiver has, what type the receiver is, but it's interesting for them that such receiver was in someone's home," says Zheleznyov.
Mraz chose Zheleznyov's rusting hangar over Moscow's big state institutions for his exhibition's key collaboration with Austria's prestigious Vienna Museum.
Still further from the city centre, high-rise residential blocks jostle with vast highways, evidence of Moscow's rapid post-communist expansion.

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