The Winzavod Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow presents ´It Happened to Me´, the second exhibition in a series reflecting on the institution’s own history, curated by the internationally renowned Viktor Misiano. Dedicated to memory and its transformations, the show examines how the past shapes the present, a theme art critic Sergei Khachaturov explores through the visual mechanisms and allure of recollection.

Over the past two decades since its foundation in 2006, Winzavod, a former winery converted into an art centre and gallery hub in Moscow has amassed a significant art collection and archive. Recently, it has launched a series of exhibitions which focus on its own history under the title of ´NII Arkhiv´ (Research Institute ‘Archive’). To mark the institution´s 20th anniversary next year, artists have been invited to look back and reflect on their personal creative journeys. To focus on individual artistic paths rather than presenting a chronicle of the institution´s most colourful episodes – like the attack by ‘patriotic’ right-wing activists on the now-defunct Guelman Gallery whose owner Marat Guelman was declared an extremist and foreign agent by Russian authorities - feels like a safer approach in today’s Russia.

The division between the exhibition’s two levels is striking in itself. The first floor, austere and almost monochrome, offers an ascetic atmosphere filled with nuanced, intimate works that trace the personal textures and traumas of memory. The upper floor, by contrast, unfolds as a sequence of total installations—monumental, theatrical, and marked by the presence of valuable objects once shown at major biennales.

The ten artists in ‘It Happened to Me’ have all participated in exhibitions on Winzavod's territory in the past and here recall various images, strategies and spatial associations that they once created. It´s a neat time capsule which can easily open like Pandora's Box, from which various complexes tumble out, wedded to the nature of egocentric art practitioners, above all – to narcissism. As a project examining the social psychology of individuals dreaming of freedom within an unfree country, ´It Happened to Me´ succeeds. Yet we also might consider to what extent is it interesting for an outsider not previously immersed in the experiences of these ‘ten characters’ to delve into the references and appropriations of what is, in its very essence, hermetic and built on signaling systems readable only by a narrow circle.

Viktor Misiano invites us to start our journey through the exhibition from the second floor. Accommodated throughout a cavernous space, one installation leads on to the next by artists Vladimir Logutov (b. 1980), Yan Ginzburg (b. 1988), Irina Korina (b. 1977) and Sergey Sapozhnikov (b. 1984). Vladimir Logutov has created a closed pavilion with small windows which the visitors cannot enter. There are photographic prints on the exterior walls which document a 2017 exhibition ‘Next Level’. This show was devoted to the life cycle of an artwork, from its inception, creation in material form, to packaging and installation in a gallery. These traces of the life of an art object are thus found on the external contours of one´s memory. There are also television screens showing conversations with various artists about questions of perception and expertise. Inside the pavilion, there are paintings on the element of fire, a theme which Logutov is currently exploring. Black-and-white works can be observed through the windows. Mirrors expand the space. Thus, the present pushes back the boundaries of the past and one´s memory of it.

Then ‘At the Black Rock’, a coworking zone, is a quintessential bold and appealing work by Irina Korina (b.1977). She has gathered together various objects which she previously exhibited at different times including an inflatable ruin-rock and a tower-pavilion with a viewing platform. She has created a kind of forum with chairs and tables set with mounds of multi-colored plasticine. In the spirit of the actionists of the 1950s, visitors here can sit down and become an artist and engage in art communication on equal terms. Perhaps this excellent strategy is the only escape from the complex of narcissistic dependence in ‘It Happened to Me’. From Korina's tower construction, visitors can survey the entire space of the White Hall.

On one side, the hall’s large windows are covered with Sergey Sapozhnikov’s photographic series documenting the preparation of exhibition spaces for a show. The artist creates a compelling visual curtain between the illusory world of exhibition design and the reality outside—the workshops and factory chimneys beyond the glass. On the opposite side, through a vast inflatable rock, unfolds the spectacular realm of Yan Ginzburg’s installation ´Mechanical Beetle. Reminiscence´.

In his space, Ginzburg has created a multilayered, multi-contoured investigation of various artefacts of Moscow Conceptualism. Layered, one upon the another, they create a complex linguistic construction, critical in relation to the canonical works by Ilya Kabakov (1933-2023) or Ivan Chuikov (135-2020). Thanks to erudition and subtle rhyming of images and themes (including the seat of an old Zhiguli car on which Kabakov was photographed during a picnic with friends), Ginzburg breaks open the contours of egocentric self-admiration. He brings the game of Conceptualism's trompe-l'œil to some interesting meta-level of new communication and generalization. The bright, pop-art window-display suddenly brought to mind the aesthetics of London's Independent Group of the first half of the 1950s (Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), the founding fathers of New Brutalism Reyner Banham (1922-1988), Alison (1928-1993) and Peter (1923-2003) Smithson). They explored new possibilities for staging exhibitions through low-grade production materials, advertising imagery, technical documentation, and the discarded remnants of mass culture. In essence the London Independents became pioneers of a universal synthesis—presenting art’s concerns as a form of new anthropology. Yan Ginzburg emerges as an engaging successor to this tradition.

The broad panoramic vision adopted in the White Hall are replaced downstairs in the Red Hall by narrow perspectives and an apology for pinpoint pricks. Dmitry Gutov (b. 1960) has turned to a painting by Baroque master Caravaggio (1570-1610), ‘The Incredulity of Saint Thomas’. He has created a fragmentation of the painting with wounds in the chest of the Saviour, which the Apostle Thomas touched in order to believe in the Resurrection after the path of suffering on the cross. This zooming into an old master painting references a previous work by Gutov, a photographic enlargement of the feet of Christ taken down from the Cross from a painting by High Renaissance artist Mantegna (1431-1506). From the standpoint of enlightenment, the seemingly naïve attempt to make us feel the pain that echoes through this old master painting is, in fact, disarmingly effective. From the position of true understanding and authentic compassion, this method of zooming into paintings is naive and resembles memes in gadgets. I remember that it was in the Brera Gallery in Milan, standing before Mantegna's painting ‘Dead Christ’, that I understood that this small format and the body of the Saviour, not distorted by photographic enlargement, carry the genuine emotion of compassion and intimate grief, which you do not get by employing an advertising trick.

In a fortuitous placement, an installation by Pyotr Bely (b.1971) called ´Pause´ is situated next to Gutov´s fragmentation of Caravaggio. A circular saw and a black sun, refer to a 2011 work by the artist. The saw splashes acrylic paint onto the wall and becomes an important metaphor for wounded painting and cuts in the film of everyday life. It rhymes both with Gutov's photoprint and with the slashed paintings by the master of Italian Transavanguardia, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968).

The exhibition concludes with four artists whose works touch something deeply personal, vulnerable, and hidden. Evgeny Granilshchikov’s (b. 1985) film reflects on the joy and loss of communication; Dima Filippov (b. 1989) offers an intimate monologue into the void, seeking above all an honest exchange; Ivan Novikov’s (b. 1990) LOCUS SACER revisits memories of parents who are no longer alive; and Alexandra Sukhareva’s (b. 1983) repeated childlike drawings evoke a quiet dissolution of self. Together, these works form a gradual fading—a thinning out—of the exhibition’s central theme, ´It Happened to Me´. At this point, aesthetic judgment feels almost unethical. One recalls Shakespeare’s words from ´Hamlet: “The rest is silence.”