At the International Contemporary Art Fair Cosmoscow in September, the Cultural Creative Agency organized an open-call for artists, an exhibition, and a discussion program called Turbulence, in which several artists and theorists contemplated new ways of interaction and solidarity between people. One of the central elements of the program was Majlis—a space for meetings and conversations, in which our magazine organized a series of interviews with fair guests and program participants. The goal of Conversations on Turbulence is to understand how to navigate in today's world, where not only air currents collide, but also our identities, social contexts and seemingly immutable definitions.
In one of these interviews, the artist Taus Makhacheva, who works with the themes of ethnicity, identity, and gender, and Maria Lind, a curator and theorist of contemporary art who currently works as a cultural attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow, shared their personal experiences dealing with turbulence and discussed how it can be understood in the context of artistic activity.
In addition to the conversation between Taus and Maria, we recorded four more conversations. In one of them, artist Polina Kanis and cultural scholar Lera Kononchuk discussed new forms of communication and instability as a reason to listen to the world. In another one, artist Ikuru Kuwajima and EastEast photo editor Anastasia Indrikova speculated about turbulence as a condition for new emergences. In the third, philosopher Elena Petrovskaya and sygma editor Konstantin Koryagin talked about the possibilities of the philosophical understanding of this complex phenomenon. Finally, in the last interview, the Ambassador of the State of Qatar to the Russian Federation Fahad bin Mohammed Al-Attiyah spoke with the director of the Cultural Creative Agency Anastasia Shavlokhova about similarities between Qatari and Russian values and ways to establish links between cultures.
All conversations are available on our YouTube channel.
