ZIP Group is a collective of artists from Krasnodar (Stepan Subbotin, Vasily Subbotin, Evgeny Rimkevich, Eldar Ganeev (to 2017), Konstantin Chekmarev (to 2012), and Denis Serenko (to 2011)) that came together in 2009 and became one of the most significant phenomena on the Russian contemporary scene of the 2010s and 2020s. The name of the group is derived from Krasnodar Measuring Instruments Factory (Zavod izmeritel’nykh priborov), where the artists’ studios were located until 2015 and where their first exhibition took place.
The ZIP artists have won numerous awards and over 15 years they formed a unique art scene in Krasnodar, founding Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KISI) and organizing the independent street art festival MOZHET (since 2010). ZIP Group mainly works with the genre of total installation, using its projects to explore themes of labor, community, and self‑organization, creating utopian spaces for work, leisure, and interaction.
The Panels are part of the installation DK ZIP Stop and were shown at Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2017, as a result of which the group won Project of the Year at the 11th Kandinsky Prize ceremony. The project occupied the fourth floor and was a detailed report on seven years of working together. Rather than a classic retrospective, the artists presented viewers with a journey through the group’s mythologized universe. Curator Elena Selina described it as follows: “It is no accident that the exhibition develops upward through the various floors. It begins with the present (‘Now’) and ends with ‘BARcelona,’ with the past (‘The Day Before Yesterday’) and the future (‘Then’) in between. The present on the first floor, according to the artist’s witty definition, is ‘a street hallucination’ that has frozen for a second before dissolving in the calm contemplation of the past on the second floor. On the third floor, viewers can look through spyglasses at a utopian future and spin in the timeless cycle of ‘BARcelona’ on the top floor.” The Panels offer an excursus into the story of the Pyatikhatki art residency and take the form of a collage made from local maps, photographs, and descriptions of exhibitions and actions of various years.
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