Recreational Diving
sound art and audio guided walk for the “48 hours. Novosibirsk” art festival

as part of “No Excuse Group” (Masha Alexandrova, Maria Rybka, Yuri Kuzmenko)

At night, the sea becomes black and breathes deeply, as it devours the dreams of those who live nearby, mixing them with dreams of fish. In return, the sea transforms one into a fisherman. 

When we found ourselves on an island and in Novosibirsk city center at the same time, we soaked up its energy of a noisy, industrial, maritime energy, and created a dream collecting bureau, where we exchanged houseplants for people’s love stories and dreams. 

The islanders’ survival strategies were very different — from grounding, which has no place for memories and feelings, to escaping to the world of dreams and becoming a demiurge. To step into the world of magic, to seek out a magic crystal, to fall in love with a guy from the port for the rest of one’s life, to dream of water — is to survive.

/lie down on the lounge chair/ put on the headphones/ start your journey across the island/

Curator: Lera Novitskaya
Photo: Vladimir Zhulanov

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“Harvest Festival With Elements of Burlesque” 
for the “Art-Prospect 2021” international festival at Gaza Cultural Center as part of the “No Excuse Group” (Masha Alexandrova, Maria Rybka, Yuri Kuzmenko)

The Gaza Cultural Center is a traditional place of leisure and recreation for the Kirov Plant workers. 
We performed a ritual of connecting the agricultural and human cultures. That day, wheat, vegetables, the cultural center staff, citizens, and machinery collided into a united mystery of fertility, exchanged energies, juices, vibrations, and created a joint experimental field of new hybrids and connections. 
One of the main characters of the festival — the legendary “Kirovets” tractor — uncovered its new nature, enriched by the connections with the world of plants, flowers, vegetables, techno raves, and field spirits.

The festival started with a performance/concert, dedicated to the “Queer Kirovets” featuring the cultural center ensembles and invited performers. The concert culminated in the meeting with the legendary “Kirovets” and a shared meal featuring energetically charged crops. Aside from the concert, the festival attendees could visit tents doubling as installation artworks: a tent for meditations and energetic recharge with a fertility altar; a vegetable touch spa for full relaxation and transition of the consciousness to an experimental plane; a vegetable rave. 

Curator: Lera Lerner

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“Field of Vegetable Touch”
involving performance for attendees at the “Art-Prospect 2021” international festival at Gaza Cultural Center as part of the “No Excuse Group” (Masha Alexandrova, Maria Rybka, Yuri Kuzmenko)

Embrace the field and its spirits, relax, sprout like a seed, strive for the sun, and bloom. In the field, everyone could receive a spa treatment, based on the symbiosis between vegetables and fruits. 

In our spa, the participants relaxed and made an internal journey from a seed to an adult plant, soaked up juices and smells of plants, that the participants took with them.

Curator: Lera Lerner

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“Daydream Hotel”, temporary installation art for the “48 hours. Novosibirsk” art festival
as part of the “No Excuse Group” (Masha Alexandrova, Maria Rybka, Yuri Kuzmenko)

The “Daydream” hotel is a refuge, an experimental home, and a transient monument. It refers to practices of self-organization: their spontaneous emergence, life, and disappearance. 
We built our hotel using materials found in the city, and made it our home for 48 hours in the center of Novosibirsk, in the Pervomayskiy park in front of the “Central” hotel.

We invited all comers to have dinner and conversations. The evening of September 17th we organized a screening of films of regional directors. The hotel featured a field kitchen: we cooked buckwheat using a burner, brewed tea, shared pastries. 
We were happy to share this experience with passers-by, locals, and visiting artists. 
After 48 hours, our structure disappeared as spontaneously as it had first appeared. 

Curators: “No Name”
Photo: Maxim Omelchenko

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Unauthorized Community Garden, 2020-2021
annual seasonal practice
as part of the “No Excuse Group” (Masha Alexandrova, Maria Rybka, Yuri Kuzmenko)

Our gardening community was born in the spring of 2020.
On May 1, the Labor Day in Russia, we planted potato in various locations in Omsk, including the location under the Lenin Monument at the Agricultural Academy.
This practice was born out of the wish to have a dacha (a summer house) — none of the art group members has a dacha but all of us love taking care of plants, so one day we decided that the city will become our dacha.
For two years in a row, we have been planting potatoes on May 1. We plant potatoes in flowerbeds and front gardens, search for empty lots and uninhabited areas, invisible to the eyes and care of city gardeners, but the reality doesn’t always match our expectations. It’s an experiment with many agents — and sometimes, we lose young plants to lawnmower blades or to weeding by the city management staff.

During the summer, we take care of the surviving plants, check and water them, and send each other pictures of our plants if we are nearby. In fall, we harvest our crops. The harvest is modest — we plant more potatoes than we collect, but those potatoes are very valuable to us, and we never miss a chance to share them with friends and collaborators in our projects.

Aside from potatoes, we also plant various flowers and observe other practices of partisan gardening in the city.

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“Nadenka’s Textile Library”, 2020
“NADENKA” art group (Masha Alexandrova, Maria Rybka, Nastya Makarenko, Nadya Valetskaya, Alyona Isakhanyan), Omsk Art Museum

This exhibition invites you into a textile library space. It is not an ordinary library, it is devoid of any formal bureaucratic procedures. You find yourself in an intimate and trusting atmosphere of women’s writing and women’s speech. 
What models of family, collectivity, and relationship do we have now and what do we want them to look like?
To tell about the experience of living and growing up in a family, we use a traditional medium for both contemporary female art and historical handicraft — fabrics and embroidery, collecting a literal textile book library, as well as a library of “story-books”, taking a different form.

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“Prevention / Salvation / Help”, 2020
as part of the “No Excuse Group” (Masha Alexandrova, Maria Rybka, Yuri Kuzmenko)

On the last day of summer, we did an unauthorized exhibition by claiming changing stalls on the Omsk beach. 

Each participant of the “No Excuse Group” chose a changing stall and used it to tell their love story — through collages, portraits, flower petals, photos, drawings, letters, and texts. The “Prevention” pavilion was claimed by Yuri, Maria took “Salvation”, and Masha chose “Help”. We used the largest changing stall for two to house our mutual crushes — the trio’s beloved cultural icons. 

We lied on the surface and made predictions — we told fortunes on the requests of the spectators and gave them candy with riddles. 
The exhibition culminated with the launch of our friend Vlad to the high seas, who was accompanied by two ships with scarlet sails on two five-liter empty bottles of mineral water. 

That day favored all broken and tender hearts. Lifeguards turned into spectators, the citizens of Omsk — into benevolent prying eyes.

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“Creature”, 2020
as part of the “No Excuse Group” (Masha Alexandrova, Maria Rybka, Yuri Kuzmenko)

An installation artwork at a defunct factory “Saturn”, made with salvaged materials, germinated seeds, and brine shrimp larvae. The curators of the project invited the artists to ponder upon retrofuturism. 
We offered our vision of the future of the factory after humans in the form of intuitive installation art.

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