PETER BELYI
Russian Eden
(St. Petersburg, Russia)
Russian Eden resurrects the trick fountain tradition of the Peter I era. Belyi’s trademark combination of two opposite aesthetic styles is present in the work’s baroque “excess,” on the one hand, and its familiar abandoned construction site brutalism on the other. By examining ways of coexisting and expanding on the festival theme, the author deconstructs deconstruction, uniting two equally valid realities that share the same essentially chaotic nature. The baroque nature of a trash heap temporarily transformed into a humorous trick fountain here becomes a kingdom of water and trash.
Peter Belyi is an artist and curator. He received his MFA from Camberwell College of Arts in London in 2000. Belyi’s primary medium is large-scale installations. His works reside in museum collections across the world, including the Margulies Collection (USA), the State Russian Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). His curatorial experience includes shows at the Kunsthalle Zürich and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Belyi is the founder and curator of Luda Gallery, an independent, non-profit research initiative in contemporary art. He teaches at St. Petersburg State University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Belyi has been the winner of the Sergey Kuryokhin Award (Best Work of Visual Art, 2010) and the Innovation Prize (Best Curatorial Project, 2014).