Cosmoscow 2022 announces the list of participants
With its 10th edition to take place on September 15—17 at Moscow’s Gostiny Dvor (4, Ilyinka St), Cosmoscow International Contemporary Art Fair announces this year’s participants. There will be booths by over 65 Russian galleries with 13 of them displaying works by international artists from USA, Estonia, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, China, Japan, and South Korea. You can learn more about each gallery on our website in the "Galleries" section.
Margarita Pushkina, Cosmoscow director:
“The 10th edition of Cosmoscow will start in no time. This is our anniversary year. Once again, contemporary art galleries will gather at one venue, and Cosmoscow guests will be able to see new projects by contemporary authors and purchase the works they like. This year, we are launching a new permanent DIGITAL section which will feature galleries with projects dedicated to new media and digital art, as well as online marketplaces for digital art including NFT. Being a complex organism, the fair is constantly changing and looking for new formats in order to effectively build communication with all the art market participants, acting as the most important tool for its development.”
As usual, galleries will be divided into sections depending on their specialization. Both young and well-known galleries with their own exhibition space take part in the MAIN section. FRAME brings together galleries that do not have a permanent space or operate as a showroom. The EDITIONS section includes galleries dealing with prints and multiples, while the DESIGN section presents galleries working with contemporary and collectible design. This year, the fair will feature a new permanent section — DIGITAL — curated by the Instigators art group, an international art research project that has brought together a community of artists, curators and crypto enthusiasts around the new NFT medium to build a bridge between the blockchain and the physical world. Another new section — NETWORK — will bring together projects aimed at developing infrastructure, education and communications in the field of contemporary art and increasing interest in collecting.
As the curators of the DIGITAL section, the Instigators art group will present the Phygital Is the New Digital exhibition project. Its participants (Denis Davydov, Uta Bekaia, Ksenia Obukhovskaya, Kirill Rave, and Dmitry Shabalin) will try to answer the most pressing questions: what justifies the use of blockchain technology in art and how artists understand the relationship between digital and physical objects.
The Instigator art group:
“It is accurate to treat NFT as a phenomenon that declared itself last year not ambiguously (with either too much enthusiasm or rejection), but rather from the position of an observer. After all, time best determines the practical role of technology and its integration into the mass cultural context. During the first year of life and discourses in the information realm (the genesis of the technology took place in 2014), NFT was able to achieve one major thing: it led people to believe that a digital object can have value and, as a result, attracted a huge number of visual researchers to join its ranks. As part of Cosmoscow, we, the Instigators art group, will present only one aspect of what NFT can be in the hands of the creators of modernity — a transcendent product between the real and digital world, capaciously defined by the catchy term 'phygital'”.