exhibition "Still New Year. Still Adults"
Olya Makhno, "The Point of Pain"
Alexandra Pavlovskaya, "Poloz"
Ulyana Agban, "The Altar of Wish Fulfillment"
Moscow Art Group "We Have Opened" | Aksana Prutskova, Tatyana Gogoleva, Yuri Chernyshev | "Between"
Margarita Zhuravleva, "Transition"
Nina Veresova, "A Table for One"
Denis Budilov, "Lux"
the group "this is us", Anastasia Armeeva | Ksenia Levenkova "the place of the sofa"
Anastasia Armeeva, "Tiny Hunters"
the exposition of the exhibition
Masha Shishova "Mr. Spicha"
Alyosha Geld "The Smell* of Chocolate"
Marusya
Alexandra Nesterkina, "Daphne"
Galina Ignatenko, "Chronicle in Fabric: Embroidering the Year"
Dasha Dada Bludova, and "annie, are you okay?*"
Daria Klementyeva, "At the Table", From the Family Album project
Vika Uystraikh, "Ring"
Olya Makhno | Alexey Chumak, "Miscarriage"
Elena Tormysheva, "The Shell"
Daria Klementyeva, "Morning Party", project "From the Family Album"
Evgeniya Bolyukh, "pozar"
Inga Allakova, "From Nowhere"
Daria Klementyeva, "Crossword"
Still New Year. Still Adults
2024
The future is not enough.
The old, the new – neither is enough.
Let Eternity stand in the middle of the room
like a festive Christmas tree.
— Boris Pasternak
As in Pasternak’s poem, the future today seems to be in increasingly short supply—and we feel this acutely. Yet neither the new nor the old, on its own, can ever be enough. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten how to inhabit the present. Childishly lingering in a past softened by memory, or retreating into a distant—and therefore safe—future, we surrender responsibility for the time in which we live, work, and build friendships. The present, after all, is always about people. And, ultimately, about honesty.
The turn of the calendar year is traditionally seen as a threshold: a moment of transition, rupture, and change. A state of in-betweenness. A time suspended between nostalgia and the expectation of a mythical miracle. This is, in essence, the Timeless Space I find myself returning to again and again—the state that Boris Pasternak calls Eternity.
Even if today it resembles the Old New Year—an absurd holiday, linguistically as well as culturally—it remains essential to do something meaningful now, today. Within the community where we studied or continue to study, where we teach, where we find the strength to imagine change and hope it will be for the better.
We live in a time marked by a profound lack of collaboration, solidarity, and mutual support. That is why we value every opportunity to create these conditions ourselves—and to allow other artists to recognize their own strength within them.
Still New Year. Still Adults. brings together representatives of different creative disciplines: more than fifty artists and collectives from seven schools of Universal University. Through distinct practices and perspectives, they attempt to build a polylogue across several exhibition venues, reflecting on what deserves to be reimagined and what should be preserved in the fragile interval between the old and the new. In the present—where, as in a children's cartoon, even the placement of a comma can change everything.
Goodbye, New Year.
Hello, new year.
Olga Makhno
Curators: Olga Makhno, Misha Levin
Producer: Elizaveta Golovchenko
With special thanks for their support in organizing the exhibition and realizing the installation:
Oksana Smirnova, Maksim Kovtun, Anastasia Kashapova, Darya Mozhaeva, Denis Franchuk.
A multidisciplinary exhibition of contemporary art by students, alumni, and tutor of Universal University. The project was implemented in 11.12 gallery, CCA "Winzavod", January-February 2024