Yesterday I attended an event rather out of keeping with my usual routine, at the Avtoklaster

Yesterday I attended an event rather out of keeping with my usual routine, at the Avtoklaster. If you are wondering what on earth the Parnassian Mockingbird has to do with a space for devotees of the motor industry, I answer: firstly, small private museums are often more interesting than old, moss-grown institutions; secondly, I myself once busied myself with integrating contemporary art into spaces that were never intended for it.
It was precisely such an integration that occasioned my visit to the territory of motorists, car tuners, racing drivers and car collectors, housed in a former taxi depot, Number 19.

The Avtoklaster 19/21 space has opened an exhibition by a young artist, Vladimir Kravchenko. Such openings matter a great deal, not only to the authors and the teams behind them, but to the community as a whole: they help normalise the perception of contemporary art among a public not oriented towards it. True, next door stands a perfectly canonical car museum with Japanese retro automobiles, but a strictly professional milieu is hardly disposed to showing contemporary artists, which makes the intervention both memorable and capable of changing one's idea of the cultural landscape of the place.

The exhibition presented a series of works devoted to the evolution of belief. From abstract primordial gods, the Universal Mother and the Thousand-Eyed Argus, Egyptian deities and mythology, it moves to modern internet cryptids and folklore of the Skibidi variety, the Bibendum and our indispensable Kanye. In the middle stands a sculptural tombstone of the god Pan.

I overheard guests trying to make sense of it all and asking the artist, for instance, what technique he draws in, or how these images come to him, whether it is some sort of genre or whether he simply dreams them. Such questions are not often heard at a customary exhibition, where one is not supposed to ask too much, lest one appear ignorant. Here, however, there was an organic meeting of viewer and art, of a viewer who genuinely looks and tries to fit what he has seen into his picture of the world.

Well done to them all: the artist, the curator and the organisers. I am always glad when someone gives a platform to the young and helps them to speak about themselves.