Educational programme

Lectures, meetings with artists, talks and city walks are also part of the Expanding Space learning programme.

Most of the lectures and talks are devoted to interaction with the urban environment, whether artistic or in terms of other practices. The art critic Gleb Napreenko gives a lecture Political Art in the City about which modalities are available to an artist in relation to the urban environment: from dialogue to open confrontation. The urbanist Elena Trubina uses her field studies in Medellin (Colombia), Kuala Lumpur and Nizhny Novgorod to talk about artistic practices and their role in the identification of the city and the identity of citizens, cultural heritage and urban economy. Andrey Vozyanov, an anthropologist and sound researcher, takes as his theme the soundscape of the modern city, soundscapes as forms of social life and urban subcultures of listening, muting and producing sound. A lecture by the Berlin curator Susa Pop Digital Technologies in Public Art and the Creation of an Urban Media Environment is dedicated to how information elements of urban design can change human relations.

The curator of the 56th Venice Biennale Okwui Enwezor, speaking with Maria Mkrtycheva, the head of the V–A–C educational department, goes into the relations between the centre and the periphery, the local and the global in the modern era. Art theorist and art critic Trude Iversen, founder of the research platform KORO (Norway) dedicated to public art, talks about the specifics of curatorial work with public art and public spaces. The curator Anna Bitkina, co-founder of the TOK Creative Association of Curators, gives a lecture on artistic practices as a method of social change.

Three events of the learning programme atr held in the format of tours and city walks. Artist Arseny Zhilyaev conducts a tour around the Krasnaya Presnya Moscow park. Anastasia Ryabova, the author of the project Zvezdny Prospekt-2, conducts a tour of Yuzhny Chertanovo neighborhood, in the course of which participants have to cope with procedures — a set of situations that often arise on the city streets. Artists from the Futurefarmers and the Urban Fauna Lab collectives discuss traditional aspects of life in a hyper-informational society during a boat trip.

The films selected for the program of film screenings at GES-2 are presented by the V–A–C curator Kirill Adibekov. It includes the films Zhores (Vincent Dietre, 2012), Communists (Jean-Marie Straub, 2014), De Son Appartement (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 2007), Helsinki, Forever (Peter von Bag, 2008), Afterword to the 1942 Brochure (Stanislav Doroshenkov, 2012) and One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later (James Benning, 2005).

Three screenings are held in the buildings closely related to the plot of the film. Nikolai Sanishvili’s comedy Splinter about the fight against "architectural excesses" was filmed in 1956, and V–A–C showed it at the Peking Hotel — one of the last monumental Stalinist buildings in Moscow, completed in 1956. Andrey Smirnov's Faith and Truth (1979) about the crucial transition for Soviet architects to model house construction is shown in the Central Tourist House, built in 1979. And the short comedy Uncle’s Apartment (1913) is set in the Nirnsee house, a popular Moscow filming location in the same year.