The Art Prospect Festival showcases innovative art projects that activate public space and facilitate international collaboration and community engagement. Art Prospect invites artists from around the world to transform familiar urban landscapes with temporary, site-specific, and participatory art works and performances addressing local concerns, histories, and cultures. This annual event promotes innovative forms of creative interaction, challenging artists and local residents to reexamine the urban environment, local history and cultural practices.

 

Since 2012, more than 250 artists from twenty countries have participated in Art Prospect Festivals of public art in St. Petersburg (Russia), Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Baku (Azerbaijan), Tbilisi (Georgia) and Kyiv (Ukraine).  In 2020, Festival organizers developed a new on-line and on-site format, bringing together artists and audiences from thirteen countries.  The new format made it possible not only to hold the Art Prospect Festival during the COVID-19 pandemic, observing safety standards, but also to significantly expand the audience of the festival.

 

The Art Prospect Festival in 2023 will be conducted in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) in collaboration with the locally initiated Trash Festival organized by the Bishkek School of Contemporary Art and Tazar Kyrgyzstan.  Entitled ART PROSPECT & TRASH-5 - Interpreting the History of Pollution, the Festival brings together more than twenty artists from Kyrgyzstan, Russia, U.S., Switzerland, Georgia and Kazakhstan to collaborate on the creation of site-specific installations and performances dedicated to the problem of waste. 

 

CEC ArtsLink closed its St. Petersburg office and ceased all public programs and events in Russia in response to Russia’s  invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In line with CEC ArtsLink’s policy on Russia’s war against Ukraine, we continue to maintain contact and engage with independent artists from Russia who oppose the war and stand for peace and individual freedom, whose voices are currently silenced or suppressed by the authoritarian government.  We do not work with any Russian state institutions or state funded organizations or the individuals employed by them.