The Art Prospect Residency Program together with Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art is glad to welcome our resident in Minsk, Belarus!
Vyacheslav Akhunov (Tashkent, Uzbekistan) will spend his time exploring Minsk and its arts organizations, conducting research, creating new work, and sharing his art with the local community. Below is information about the participant and his proposed residency project. During his stay, Vyacheslav will share his experience and observations as visiting artist in Minsk in the Art Prospect Residency Program Blog.
Vyacheslav Akhunov (Tashkent, Uzbekistan)
Vyacheslav Akhunov is an Uzbek and Kyrgyz artist, the founding-father of contemporary art in Uzbekistan, a representative of the independent art scene that links two eras of non-conformist art – Soviet and post-Soviet. In the late 1970s he established his own creative tendency called “Socialist Modernism”.
Akhunov lives and works in Tashkent. Since 2011 he has been confined to his own country: the Uzbekistan authorities deprived the artist of the ability to travel abroad to participate in exhibitions, stating that this was “not advantageous”. He has taken part in such major exhibitions as dOCUMENTA 13, the 51st, 52 and 55th Venice Biennales, the Singapore Biennale of Contemporary Art (2006, 2013), Atlas (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid), ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany), the Sammlung Falckenberg (Hamburg, Germany), Ostalgia at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the 11th International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Istanbul, Traces du sacré (Centre Pompidou, 2008) and the Centre for Contemporary Art (Munich, Germany)
Project
In the course of his residency, Vyacheslav Akhunov intends to realize the project “Derivativeness as a lack of knowledge?”. In the project, the artist compares the practices of Uzbek artists with those of artists from different countries and studies derivativeness in the art of Uzbekistan, art devoid of the logic and methodology of a modern system of knowledge and disciplinary divisions, one that does not reflect the main symptoms of its time and specific historical moments in forms new for the art of Uzbekistan, marking the end of the colonial era, the problem of a post-colonial cultural identity with the principles for its formation and representation, a turn towards a decolonial discourse.
ART PROSPECT RESIDENCY PROGRAM 