Lace Grace Revolt

The Alan Nekhay Foundation opens its doors for the first time with the exhibition “Lace, Elegance and Rebellion”—a curatorial expression of the foundation’s commitment to supporting contemporary art and to re-questioning the concepts of equality, sustainability and representation in today’s cultural context. Bringing together works by contemporary Russian women artists from the foundation’s collection, this collective exhibition aims to present a critical challenge to the relations of domination, limits of visibility and forms of subjectification in art. The title “Lace, Elegance and Rebellion” points to three fundamental dimensions that reflect the multi-layered nature of women’s experiences. These three pillars:

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Represent the delicate interweaving of meanings and ideas

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Makes visible the bodily aesthetics of creative gestures and the impact of non-verbal communication

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Symbolic a stance against exclusion and the emergence of a new subjective identity.

This project, which came to life in Türkiye, paves the way for interaction between different cultures and contributes to the repositioning of Russian contemporary art in a global context. The exhibition looks at femininity, the body, materiality and post-Soviet identity through a lens where social lines of division intersect, questioning the traces of factors such as gender, race and class in art production.

In addition to their painting and graphic practices, the artists also use materials that have long been excluded from institutional art status and have been traditionally marginalized (ceramics, embroidery, textiles). These mediums allow artists to emphasize critical potentials and to reiterate the artistic validity of meditative and material art forms in the digital age.

Pink, the dominant visual element of the exhibition, has long been associated with patriarchal clichés, but here it is redefined as a symbol of radical compassion, emotional activity and resistance to invisibility. Pink becomes an independent means of expression that questions the established systems that shape the perception of femininity and identity.

The exhibition features works by both established and emerging artists, including Taus Makhacheva, Polina Osipova, Alisa Gorshenina, Olya Avstreyh, the “Malyshki

18:22” art collective, Maria Koroleva, Polina Mayer, Masha Egorova and others.

Works from disciplines such as painting, sculpture, graphics and multimedia create a unity of independent artistic languages ​​in the exhibition space; questions the sharp distinctions between artistic

categories and makes visible alternative, complex narratives about self, performance and femininity.

The viewer is invited to both observe the collective production of knowledge and question their own place within the intellectual space opened by the exhibition.

Curator

Irina Netbai