We have already said a great deal about Blazar, but I cannot help returning once more to the design section that so appealed to me, and dwelling on one of its brightest stands: the stand of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, designed by the architect Misha Maslo

We have already said a great deal about Blazar, but I cannot help returning once more to the design section that so appealed to me, and dwelling on one of its brightest stands: the stand of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, designed by the architect Misha Maslov, which the fair named Region of the Year this time round. The theme of the stand was the Volga, and one guessed it at once: the podiums for the works rose out of a pool of real Volga water, brought specially in a quantity that must have been several thousand litres. On show were contemporary Nizhny Novgorod artists who draw in their work on folk motifs, traditional techniques or folklore imagery. At first glance I fell in love with the carved wooden frieze “The Last Temptations of Dunno” by Alexander Lavrov. I ought to have bought it on the spot, without further deliberation, but for me, as usual, the key question is where to keep all these acquisitions. Naturally, a couple of hours later the huge gingerbread board had already been sold.

But the people of Nizhny Novgorod made their mark not only at Blazar: at Cosmoscow the region presented the work of 31 artists, this time as the fruit of an art residency programme that has been running in the region for three years. In that time 75 artists and researchers have spent more than 2,000 days in residence. And that is to say nothing of the solid presence at the fair of such Nizhny Novgorod artistic phenomena as Artyom Filatov, his studio “Tikhaya”, and the duo “Provmyza”, which was named Artist of the Year this year, or of the Futuro gallery, which was judged to have the best stand.

My conclusion is this: given the will and a systematic approach, a single region, and not Moscow at that, can within a few short years take a leading position in contemporary art and culture in the country and, by its own efforts, tangibly change both the general artistic atmosphere and the balance of forces within the industry. The Nizhny Novgorod people are to be congratulated, though it is a pity, of course, that against this background the efforts of other regions are scarcely noticeable at all.