"The project "The city of conquerors" has come from a self-organized group of young artists from Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov and Samara most of whom have previously had collaborative experience. Each of the photographs, objects, videos and documents is an artistic statement devoted to the city or a street in it as living spaces that have fallen down or have been split apart. After the conqueror, the new sovereign of the subjugated city, arrives, the communal life of the citizens is totally changed and they have to learn to put up with their destiny – the destiny of the conquered. The conqueror acts as a new and absolute sovereign who creates his own laws, establishes a new order for those who have not yet fully accepted their position. The citizens stay in the city after the arrival of the conqueror but the city no longer belongs to them. Any movement around the conquered city needs permission, any activity has to be allowed. The city is filled up with prohibitions, written or unwritten, and each resident has to learn the hidden logic. Sinking into the mud of the endless emergency state, the city disappears as a community, as a sum of its residents, turning into an abstraction and a pile of unrecognizable forms. Our exhibition first and foremost serves as evidence that documents the situation; it is a loose collection of artifacts of the city left to the mercy of the conqueror. Cracks of the tiles, false documents, and random murals, rejections for appeals to organize political meetings, bags full of buckwheat and other objects and street signs captured by an artist. “The city of conquerors” is an appeal to those who had lost - the silent majority, in which one may find barely visible signs of arising hope. The hope that is based on the simple and the truly historical knowledge that one day the conqueror and the lost will change places". text by Ilya Budraitskis
