We are pleased to announce that on February 10, 2023, the exhibition hall of the Volgograd Regional Universal Scientific Maxim Gorky Library hosted the opening of the Dictionary of the Azars – exposition, prepared by our foundation together with the staff of the Library.
The exhibition presents letters and words, ABCs and dictionaries, art books and printed graphics by the artist Stanislav Azarov and the students of his workshop – Varvara Shilikhina, Alisa Kochkina and Arina Vasilevskaya, created last and already this year.
The theme of this project is an artistic interpretation of the semantics of alphabets and dictionaries in the artbook format – a unique book created by the artist and existing in a single copy. The name of the project has nothing to do with the famous novel by Milorad Pavich (except that we conducted this project in Volgograd, i.e. in the very location in which a semi-mythical Khazaria existed a long time ago). Meaningfully, our project has a much greater internal connection with another novel by Pavich (A landscape painted with tea) and with the surname of the artist Azarov himself. Which is obvious enough.
The exhibition is based on seven art books, six of which are accordions (leporello, plissée), and one is a massive object made of copper plates. Stanislav Azarov’s first artbook, THE BOOK OF NOTHING, is a manifesto similar to the art manifestos of 1910-20, which returned to us a century later. Alisa Kochkina’s ABC (Cyr/Lat) – rhythmic harmonies of color, shape and texture of letter sequences of two alphabets. The Cyrillic ALPHABET has an additional layer of images-associations, which turns the alphabet into a charade (which is very correct for Cyrillic). The objective interpretation of Harlan Ellison’s gloomy dystopia (I don’t have a mouth, but I have to scream) required Varvara Shilikhina to openly etch copper with chlorine iron, cold stamping and led to the emergence of The Tablets of the Covenant from the world in which the only intelligent being is a supercomputer, as inhuman as its creators. Arina Vasilevskaya’s artbooks do not use letters, she creates sequences of meanings from leaves, floral elements and sequentially broken glass. The book BIO is artistic interpretation of the poem by the symbolist poet Fyodor Sologub, written in 1900, FRAGILITY is a very brave and sincere work dedicated to how objects and human relationships are destroyed.
The exhibition will last until the beginning of March, admission is free.
