The main goal of the program is to support the artists. Every year, the Cosmoscow Expert Committee, consisting of art professionals, proposes the candidates. The final choice is made by the Cosmoscow Foundation’s Supervisory Board. The winning artist is given the opportunity to implement a new project, which is then exhibited at the fair.

"The future is but the obsolete in reverse" (Vladimir Nabokov).

Alexandra Gart gained fame thanks to printed graphics as a co-founder of the New Print Studio, curator of the Graphic Cabinet in the Maly Manezh, and the author of disturbingly melancholic and visually meager works that ratte like entrance windows. Like Alice falling into a rabbit hole, the viewer is completely immersed in the liminal spaces of the works abandoned by man, assembled by the artist from drastically broken lines and black and gray spots in the windows and doors of typical high-rise buildings, details of the urban landscape, forests, chain-link fencing, blank fences and courtyard walls, lamp posts, and frames of destroyed or never completed buildings. Despite the recognizability of the details, the nature of these spaces remained unclear, transitional, elusive, and oscillating between extremes: between calm and anxiety, stability and instability, relaxation and tension, past and future.
A strange hypnotic state of being in limbo, a feeling of surreal dreamlike suspension in timelessness and inaction, is reflected in the work "The Constancy of Fun and Dirt" exhibited at Cosmoscow. The title is borrowed from Daniil Kharms. His poem of the same name is a poetic text about the slipping away of time, its annihilation under the influence of two energies: carefree fun and undivided despair from contact with the darkest sides of life and the human soul, which occurs with the constancy of a single figure — a spy, a god, a demiurge.

The poem is dated 1933, when Kharms responded to the events of those years with absurdism and (proto-)existentialism, which surprisingly brought the Soviet avant-garde poet and the St. Petersburg artist together. "The Constancy of Fun and Dirt" by Alexandra Gart is an installation in the form of a massive, round-sectioned metal structure covered with wooden boards, the heavy frame of which supports the figures of horses placed around the perimeter. The geometry of the structure and its elements form the image of a carousel, supported by the central location of the installation at the fair’s venue and the format of the event itself. It seems that any minute now a marketplace barker will appear, inviting people to the rides and promising fun, laughter, and childishly naive carefree happiness that everyone who climbs onto the bright glossy backs of the horses will experience. But this promise is not fulfilled, the attraction turns out to be a silent crumbling ruin, a fragile testimony of who knows what. Instead of action-movement there are barely noticeable flickering, ripples, entropic processes and white noise, a monotonous drawn-out hum of millions of voices, each of which manifests its life and strives to endow it with more fun and less dirt.

Gart’s aesthetic utopia is also inactive, but its inherent lack of action seems closer to the famous monologue of a man walking to the river (1), combined with a photograph of a playground among Khrushchev-era buildings with swings torn out of the ground and a carousel standing almost vertically, accompanied by the caption "Cause life is pain." And perhaps this pain stems not from the need to feel and depict the "world-without-us," but from the idea that comparing any activity — human life, and especially an individual gesture, deed, action — with life as such in all the diversity of its manifestations, with living and nonliving life, is simply meaningless. As the text on one of Gart’s works reads, "This was the worst possible idea," all that was left was to find the best possible idea.

(1) "I have become so full of knowledge that it is as if I have been living for a hundred trillion billion years on trillions and trillions of planets like this Earth, this world is absolutely clear to me, and I am looking for only one thing here — peace, tranquility and this harmony, from merging with the infinitely eternal, from contemplating the great fractal similarity and from this wonderful all-unity."

The Cosmoscow Institution of the Year is selected by the Cosmoscow Foundation’s Supervisory Board based on a list of candidates proposed by invited experts. The winner receives funding for the implementation of the project within the framework of the fair. The focus is maintained on regional institutions.

The Center was launched on May 18, 2016 as an initiative of the New Collection Cultural Projects Support Foundation, and over the eight years of its existence, it has hosted hundreds of different events such as festivals, exhibition projects, lecture programs, conferences, round tables, seminars, public meetings and much more. The Center is a fundamentally new independent platform for Perm, created to support local cultural, social and educational initiatives. The main goal is to open them up to each other and to the city, to give communities and specific people a platform for expression and active action. To do this, the Center uses different methods and formats united by a common and main value — partnerships. This is the mission of the center: to identify, unite and present the entire diversity of urban practices.

At the Cosmoscow, the Center is represented with an expressive architectural solution in the form of a rotunda. It is neither a presentation space nor a special project. This is the Center itself, packaged in a special way. Over the years, the Center has accumulated a large archive, a lot of material evidence, traces, and results, which are shown with the help of a special architectural detail. Cosmoscow visitors are only invited to unpack this immaterial "archive."

Artist of the Year Cosmoscow 2023 Artyom Filatov is an artist, founder of the Tikhaya studio in Nizhny Novgorod, the author of objects, installations and curatorial projects based on interaction with Nizhny Novgorod history and cultural landscape. In his studio work, he reconstructs absurd mistakes spotted in real life. He looks for the "banality of evil" in everyday objects that break, lose function, or begin to take on a life of their own. Lives and works in Nizhny Novgorod.

Artist of the Year Cosmoscow 2023 Artem Filatov will present the project "Everything will disappear!" - a series of hand-drawn graphics drawn using brilliant green, a dye better known as "zelenka". Thanks to its properties, every time a folder containing a sheet of graphics is opened, the image is exposed to light and fades, shortening the life of the work with each viewing. The future owner of the graphics directly influences its condition by deciding whether to display it or not.

The sculptures for various sheets of graphics drawn in green paint are conceived as paradoxical repositories, archives and time capsules. Due to the fragility of the pattern, it requires special conditions. Sculptures become such storage units, simultaneously protecting what is placed in them, and on the other hand, creating a volumetric continuation of the graphic sheet in space. Reinforcing the paradox of the work (the work exists, but it cannot be seen in person), metal sculptures are strange mechanisms and devices, in a twisted form, serving only one thing — to preserve what is in them.

"Institutions of the Year" Cosmoscow 2023 ZAMAN is a museum of contemporary art that is being created in Ufa. The focus is on contemporary art by artists from the Volga, Kama and Ural regions (Kazan, Cheboksary, Yoshkar-Ola, Izhevsk, Perm, Chelyabinsk, Orenburg and Samara). Currently, it adheres to the concept of a "Museum without Walls" and began its work in the format of an Embassy, which lives and works according to the principles of an institution of contemporary art. The opening of its own building is planned in 2027.

"Institutions of the Year" Cosmoscow 2023, the ZAMAN museum will talk about its research and exhibition projects created over the past two years and focused on the territory of the national republics — Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Udmurtia, Chuvashia, Mari-El and neighboring regions — Perm Territory, Orenburg, Chelyabinsk and Samara regions. Translated from the Turkic languages, ZAMAN means "time", "era", which is why at its stand the institution will present an understanding of its time — measured time ("vakyt") and countable time ("sәғәt"), time of the unpredictable future ("kilәsәk") and a future time that we have yet to come up with ("zamanalar").

The Cosmoscow Foundation and the Diana Vishneva Foundation share common values (development of the dance and art community; representation of Russian authors abroad; and education of the audience), as well as joint initiatives: the creation of works in the field of contemporary art at the intersection of genres. One of these works is the “Dance and Contemporary Art” special project. It was presented as a lot in the Cosmoscow Foundation’s 9th charity auction.

On September 13 and 14, the “Dance and Contemporary Art” performance was shown at the Rassvet House of Culture. It consisted two works (“Location” and “Unequal Endings”) by choreographers Ilya Manylov, Olga Timoshenko, and Alexei Narutto inspired by Cosmoscow Artist of the Year Valery Chtak’s works and music. The project has received patronage support and has been further developed by combining two grant programs. It was created by choreographers and the production team of the Context festival. It was prepared at the STATION art platform (Kostroma), which received grant support from the Cosmoscow Foundation and was chosen as the Institution of the Year.

The project involves the selection of an artist representing a separate art project within the framework of the fair. The selection is carried out on the basis of a competitive selection.

Cosmoscow 2018 Artist of the Year - Taus Makhacheva

Expert staff 2017-2018:

• Valentin Dyakonov - art critic, art critic, curator of the Garage Museum
• Danila Bulatov - art critic, curator and researcher at the State Pushkin Museum
• Irina Gorlova - Head of the Department of Newest Trends in the Tretyakov Gallery
• Joseph Backstein - art critic, art critic, curator, director of the Institute for Contemporary Art
• Anna Tolstova - art critic, critic, art columnist for the publishing house "Kommersant"

Competitive selection of the best non-profit art institution of the year. The winner receives funding to implement his project at the fair.

Cosmoscow 2018 Non-Profit Institution of the Year - Smena Center for Contemporary Culture (Kazan)


Expert staff 2017-2018:

• Alexandra Paperno - Russian artist
• Maria Kravtsova - art critic and art critic, chief editor of the art portal Artguide.com
• Anastasia Shavlokhova - curator of special programs of the Center for Contemporary Art "Winzavod"
• Marina Sitnina - Vice President of Gazprombank and Curator of Art Banking
• Nina Bereznitskaya - editor of the Dialogue of Arts magazine

MishMash is an art group consisting of artists Misha Leykin and Masha Sumnina.

Misha Leykin graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture in 1994, was a member of the Obledenenie Arkhitektorov group (1997–2001). Masha Sumnina graduated from the Institute of Printwork in 2001 The art of MishMash is distinguished by close study of art boundaries inherited from the representatives of Moscow romantic conceptualism movement. Their "peculiar lyricism and humanity of art" is fueled by trust in random elements and sympathy towards purely private material. "Our names combined together - mishmash - in many languages means jumble, confusion. We bring uncontrollable forces into our works - wind, mold, water, spectator, coincidence, found art, etc., exploring the relationship between chaos and order. We do not create a recognizable visual style, because the task, the concept — is essential, and for each we find its own material," – comment the artists.

As part of Cosmoscow 2019, MishMash presented a total microspective of their work.

One in many images, it is nowhere and everywhere: it grows under the baseboard and makes its way at the joints, settles in the narrow passages of the end walls and lives in mismatches between the literal and metaphysical, personal and collective, material and elusive, known and mysterious, microscopic and immense, future technology and hideoism*.

*Hideoism is free from norms and regulations. It finds beauty in the ugly and perceives events as a sequence of obstacles and their overcoming by necessary means here and now. Hideoism is the ability to observe the amazing score of a virtuoso dance performed intentionally and randomly.

Alexey Maslyaev


Expert staff 2019:

• Faina Balakhovskaya – an art critic and curator. She worked for the magazines Artchronika, TimeOut Moscow and the newspaper Vremya novostei. She was the curator of several large exhibition projects, such as "Geliy Korzhev" (State Tretyakov Gallery), "Leonid Sokov. Unforgettable Meetings "(Tretyakov Gallery) and Schriftbild. Russiche Avantgarde (Deutschen Nationalbibliother, Leipzig). He currently holds the position of Advisor to the General Director of the State Tretyakov Gallery.
• Anton Belov – the director of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
• Ekaterina Vinokurova – an expert on contemporary art. She was the representative of the Haunch of Venison gallery in Russia, headed the business development of the Christie's auction house in Russia and the CIS countries.
• Anastasia Karneeva – an expert in contemporary art. For over 6 years she has been developing the business of the auction house Christie's in Russia. Since 2012, she served as director of the investment company Sapinda UK Limited, while remaining a consultant to Christie's. In 2014, she became a partner in MVG Communications Group, headquartered in New York.
• Olesya Turkina – an art critic and curator. Leading researcher in the Department of Contemporary Trends at the Russian Museum, scientific supervisor of the Master's program Curatorial Research, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University. Author of over 200 publications on contemporary art: as a regular correspondent for Flash Art International magazine, a member of the editorial board of the "Art magazine" (Moscow) and a columnist for ArtReview (London).
• Ekaterina Yakimova – director of the "Territory" festival

The 'Artist of the Year' project was created to support local artists. The annual selection of the 'Artist of the Year' is based on a competitive selection. The winner of project gets the opportunity to prepare an art work, which is presented at the Cosmoscow Fair. Cosmoscow Foundation provides curatorial, informational and financial support to the project.

Artist of the Year Pavel Otdelnov presented a specially commissioned project titled Geolocation, Please? Choose Yourself, which continues his reflection on non-places and changes in the suburban landscapes of large cities, started in his earlier series Inner Degunino and Shopping Centre. In the new project, conceived during the quarantine, the artist turns to virtual imagery: landscapes as seen through the cameras of Yandex and Google maps street view cars. The show preceded the large-scale project Russian Nowhere, which the artist is planning to launch in the near future.


Expert staff 2020:

• Anna Gor, director of the Volgo-Vyatka branch of the NCCA as part of ROSIZO "Arsenal", Nizhny Novgorod. AICA member. Commander of the Order of Arts and Literature (France);
• Victor Misiano, curator, founder and editor-in-chief of Khudozhestvenny Zhurnal;
• Milena Orlova, art critic and art critic, journalist, editor-in-chief of the Russian version of The Art Newspaper Russia;
• Olga Sviblova, art critic, doctor of art history, professor, director of the Multimedia Art Museum, academician of the Russian Academy of Arts (2012), Honored Artist of the Russian Federation (2018);
• Sophia Trotsenko, Executive Director, Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, Director of the RANEPA Design School under the President of the Russian Federation

The 'Artist of the Year' project was created to support local artists. The annual selection of the 'Artist of the Year' is based on a competitive selection. The winner of project gets the opportunity to prepare an art work, which is presented at the Cosmoscow Fair. Cosmoscow Foundation provides curatorial, informational and financial support to the project.

Irina Korina is an artist and set designer who uses textured materials and fabrics in her works and creates total installations as well. Irina is a winner of the theater award 'Debut' (1999), 'Companion' award (2006, 2009, 2012), 'Innovation' award in the 'New Generation' category (2007). In 2009, Irina was included in the long list of the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination 'Project of the Year'. Nominee of the 2010 Innovation Award and finalist of the 2011 Kandinsky Prize. Participant of the Venice Biennale (2009, 2017).

Irina Korina's installation entitled 'Razzle-Dazzle' is a contradictory and changeable space continuously tricking and confusing the viewer. Korina deduces the aesthetic law from the material, directly tangible side of life: the viewer seems to be in contact with familiar things from everyday life, but the effect of recognition is accompanied by the feeling that something went wrong with them. Everyday life appears refracted and shaped in polyphonic systems of shimmering objects that elude recognition. The internal and external, insignificant and important, intimate and public are mixed together, the size and scale of objects indicate not only their real dimensions and proportions, but the intensity of the sensory reaction to them, and the changes that they undergo break our expectations. Different parts of the installation go through amazing metamorphoses: the mausoleum becomes a small 8-sided pyramid resembling an architectural model, artificial fir trees make up an ornament or a column, the architectural decor – massive stucco – is inflated with lifebuoys and is endowed with a mission to save people.

Expert staff 2021:

• Marina Antsiperova, journalist and art critic;
• Alexandra Obukhova, art historian, curator of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, founder of the Art Projects archive and foundation;
• Nikolay Palazhchenko, Representative of Art Basel in Russia;
• Pavel Prigara, Director of the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall;
• Andrey Cheglakov, businessman, philanthropist and collector.

The 'Artist of the Year' project was created to support local artists. The annual selection of the 'Artist of the Year' is based on a competitive selection. The winner of project gets the opportunity to prepare an art work, which is presented at the Cosmoscow Fair. Cosmoscow Foundation provides curatorial, informational and financial support to the project.

Cosmoscow 2022 Artist of the Year Valery Chtak is a well-known Russian author with a well-established and distinctive artistic language which is also recognizable in the project presented at the fair.

Characters and objects in multi-layered monochrome paintings are depicted in a simplified manner, and the space in which they act is completely absent: their silhouettes are literally pinned to the surface of the picture, divided into several rectangular cells. These figurative compositions contain important attributes of Chtak’s personal freedom, expressed in skateboarder and musical subcultures and rhyming with street art (although Chtak emphasizes that he has nothing to do with street art), as well as recurring images of his iconography, including a bird, an urban landscape, a suitcase, etc. The composition also includes texts integral to Chtak’s works. They establish an important connection for the artist with the heritage of conceptual art. At the same time, Chtak does not turn the viewer into a reader. With the help of foreign languages, he translates part of the texts (individual words, replicas) into the category of pattern, ornament, decorative element, thereby connecting the verbal semiotic and visual planes of the language.

However, Chtak does not stop at the linguistic foundations of the artistic reflection of conceptualism and takes the next step in overcoming the boundaries of an autonomous art object. He introduces the context of its appearance into the semantic structure of the work. His project at Cosmoscow is a reaction to the criticism that he constantly repeats himself. He argues: “You say I make pictures that are all the same? Okay then, here’s an exhibition of identical paintings.”

Expert committee 2022:

• Dmitry Aksenov
• Pierre Brochet
• Andrey Erofeev
• Andrei Malakhov
• Olga Shishko

The annual selection of the 'Institution of the Year' is competition-based. Following the results of the competition, the Foundation provides funding for an art project to be presented at the Cosmoscow Fair, as well as curatorial and informational support.

The Zarya Center for Contemporary Art first opened its doors in Vladivostok in 2013. Zarya CCA is lo- cated within the Zarya creative cluster, in the space of the former sewing factory that gave the site its name. Zarya CCA sees its mission in presenting the Primorye region with the best of contemporary art and culture from Russia and beyond, while also supporting artists and the local art community. Over the years, Zarya has implemented dozens of projects with the participation of the local artistic com- munity, with a number of publications initiated; with the help of Zarya, works of Vladivostok artist toured around Russia and were shown in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time with some of them entering major collections (including works by Ilyas Zinatulin, Alexander Kiryakhno and Alexey Krutkin). At Cosmoscow 2019, projects presented by Zarya will be dedicated to those artists and art groups whose art became visible thanks to Zarya.



Expert staff 2019:

• Leonid Bazhanov – art critic, art historian, curator. Founder of the Hermitage Creative Association, initiator and artistic director of the State Center for Contemporary Art, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts (Department of Art History and Art Criticism), Academic Director of the Contemporary Art program at the HSE School of Design.
• Maria Kalinina – an independent curator, a member of the editorial board of the "Art Journal". She was the curator of the project to support young art "START" (Center for Contemporary Art Winzavod, 2012/2013) and the curator of the discipline at the Higher School of Economics.
• Vera Trakhtenberg – art critic, curator, teacher. Graduated from Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov (Faculty of History, Department of the History of Russian Art). She was the curator of the START project to support young art (Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, 2017/2018) and director of the pop / off / art gallery.
• Sveta Shuvaeva – an artist, illustrator and designer. Graduated from the Samara State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering. She worked in the collective studio of the Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Foundation on the street. Burakov in Moscow (2011-2016). In 2013, she opened the Svetlana gallery in her apartment, located in a closet. She was Cosmoscow Artist of the Year in 2016.
• Valery Chtak – an artist. He took part in the project "School of Contemporary Art" by Avdey Ter-Oganyan, was a member of the society "Radek" (2000-2005). Was nominated for the Innovation Prize. The artist's works are kept in the collections of the State Tretyakov galleries, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Foundation, the Deutsche Bank corporate collection, as well as in private collections of Dmitry Aksenov, Bernard Arnault, Pierre Brochet, etc.

The annual selection of the 'Institution of the Year' is competition-based. Following the results of the competition, the Foundation provides funding for an art project to be presented at the Cosmoscow Fair, as well as curatorial and informational support.

Cosmoscow 2020 Institution of the Year – Zheleznogorsk Center for Contemporary Art – presented projects by the CCA's founders, Chicory art group, who aim to establish an infrastructure for starting and developing an art environment in their hometown of Zheleznogorsk and the entire Kursk Region. In the two years since its establishment, the group of young enthusiastic artists has put together more than ten exhibition projects, and launched the Zheleznogorsk Biennale of Contemporary Art. At Cosmoscow, besides paintings and found objects, the Chicory group presented a VR project, Home Videos. Plein_air_extension, which is a collection of open-air group performances.

• Sergey Guskov, art critic, journalist, editor of the Dialogue of Arts magazine;
• Anastasia Mityushina, art historian, art critic. Curator of the public program of the Moscow Institute of Information Technologies «Garage";
• Alexandra Rudyk, editor-in-chief of the Dialogue of Arts magazine, art historian, art critic and curator;
• Nikolay Smirnov, geographer, artist and curator;
• Julia Yusma, curator, director of the HSE ART GALLERY, Moscow.

The annual selection of the 'Institution of the Year' is competition-based. Following the results of the competition, the Foundation provides funding for an art project to be presented at the Cosmoscow Fair, as well as curatorial and informational support.

This year, the award "Institution of the Year" went to the Vyksa Art Residence, a year-round platform for art professionals that allows artists to receive support and implement their ideas in Vyksa (Nizhny Novgorod Region).

Vyksa Art Residence was founded in 2017 by the Charitable Foundation 'OMK-Uchastie'. The art residence is one of the few open urban venues for Vyksa, where art professionals and the local community gather at the same time. It makes a significant contribution to the development of the city, makes the cultural landscape of Vyksa more dynamic and diverse, helps to form new connections between artists and urban communities.

Expert staff 2021:

• Kirill Ass, architect, curator, artist, publicist;
• Alexandra Generalova, curator, journalist and content strategist in the field of contemporary art;
• Anna Zaitseva, curator, deputy director for exhibition activities, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow;
• Ksenia Lamshina, Program Director of Radio Kultura;
• Ivan Streltsov, editor and art critic, co-founder of the Spectate contemporary art webzine.

The Institution of the Year program is annually held by the Cosmoscow Foundation for Contemporary Art on a competitive basis. Following the results of the competition, the Cosmoscow Foundation provides financing for the presentation of the chosen institution at the fair.

In 2022, the Institution of the Year is the STATION art platform (Kostroma), noted for its interdisciplinary activities that combine contemporary dance, theater, cinema, music, and fine arts.

The STATION art platform was founded in 2009 by Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev. The project, inspired by the idea of an alternative habitat, is located in the space of the former Linen Manufactories in the historical part of the city and consists of two halls: a gallery and a black box stage. In recent years, one of the key areas of the platform has been the residency program, which gives Russian choreographers the opportunity to carry out their research and artistic practice on the stage.


The goal of the project is to develop a platform for contemporary dance and theater at the Russian and international level, including festival activities, the organization of a residency program for performing artists, and the promotion of projects at the intersection of various art disciplines. Since 2012, the activities of STATION have been carried out with the support of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation.

Expert committee 2022:

• Elena Ischenko
• Lisa Matveeva
• Alexey Novoselov
• Danila Stratovich
• Sergey Khachaturov.

The project implies selecting an artist who presents a special art project as part of of the Fair. The choice is being made on the basis of competitive selection.

Cosmoscow 2017 Artist of the Year — Ivan Gorshkov

The choice of the best non-profit institution of the year is being made on the basis of competitive selection. The winner receives funding for the implementation of a special art project that will be presented as part of the Fair.


Cosmoscow 2017 Non-Profit Institution of the Year — Typography Centre for Contemporary Art (Krasnodar)

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increase in distance learning and online schools, encouraging many practitioners to redesign their courses to meet the new realities. The Blizhe platform is conceived as a testing ground for experimental distance learning opportunities by Russian artists who use educational formats in their practice and are driven by a sincere interest in the latest scientific advances and technologies, innovative educational models, topics and research methods, demonstrating a wide range of levels of complicity that are possible in art and pedagogical projects for different audiences.

The following artists took part in the project: Alisa Smorodina, Vasily Sumin, Anonymous group VASYARUN, Vladimir Kartashov, Lera Lerner, Anna Leonova, Sasha Puchkova, Yana Romanova, Maria Morina, Sergey Morozov, Alexandra Portyannikova, Tatiana Danilevskaya, Nikolay Alekseev, Maria Gorodetskaya, IBiom Group, Anna Rotayenko, Alena Papina, NOGR Group.

Organization of public lectures by internationally acclaimed experts with the purpose of popularizing contemporary art for the widest audience.

Last year's video clips

Cosmoscow Kids is an open project, organized annually during the Cosmoscow fair and aimed at promoting contemporary art among children. The project provides an interactive program for children.

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