Everything for the sake of building a joint cultural field with an emphasis on the global south.
The exhibits of the Russian Gallery of Arts (RGI) will be taken from Sevastopol, but not all, and only for a while. Part of the museum’s exposition will be presented at the exhibition “Under the South Sky,” which opens on October 1st at the Central Exhibition Hall of the Union of Artists of the Republic of Abkhazia. This is the gallery’s first international exhibition. The halls will showcase masterpieces of Russian painting from federal and regional museums.
Cover: Ruslan Mikailov
Spectators will see paintings by Leo Lagorio, Mikhail Klodt, the Chernetsov brothers, Alexander Chachba-Shalevashidze, Peter Konchalovsky, Konstantin Yuon, and Alexander Deineki, among others.
According to Victoria Danilyuk, scientific secretary of the Russian State Pedagogical University, the main idea of the exposition is to build a joint cultural field with an emphasis on the global south, positioning Abkhazia as a key point for interregional and interethnic exchange. The exhibition explores points of contact in cultural and historical chronology, from the first artists of the 19th century who discovered Abkhazia, to the Soviet and modern periods.
The exposition covers the progress of artistic processes in imperial, Soviet, and modern Russia, and also the integration of influences from other countries and national traditions: Russian, Armenian-Russian, Italian-Russian authors, and invited foreign artists.Danilyuk noted that the exposition is built on a nonlinear logic, offering a transition from traditional presentation formats to a space where the viewer “slides” between genres and eras.
Photo: Ruslan Mikailov
The exhibition doesn’t rely on popular images (like those of Aivazovsky), but focuses on creating a joint cultural space and discovering unexpected connections between Crimea and Abkhazia, as well as greco-Roman, byzantine, and Ottoman traditions.
The organizers will contribute half of the works from the gallery’s own collection, with the remainder coming from leading Russian museums and private collections. For example, the Bakhrushin Museum has provided a significant collection of works by alexander Chachba-SHERVASHIDSE, an artist whose work was partially lost in a fire.Most of the artist’s surviving work is returning to Abkhazia for the first time.
The rest of the artists represented include Konchalovsky and yuon (works from the Bolshoi Theater Museum) and…