Over the past four years, my professional life has been closely connected to Murmansk Oblast. From 2021 to 2023, I worked as chief curator at Siyanie Center for Contemporary Art in Apatity, and in 2022, I launched an archive of Arctic art within the Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN), for which in the two years that followed I systematized the materials I already had in my collection and initiated the gathering of new materials from personal archives.
The Archive of Arctic Art, and the Archive of the Apatity Art Scene within it, contain materials from private archives of people from artistic and public initiatives involved in the culture of the region. The collection is primarily built around people and self-organized collectives active from the mid 1970s to the late 2000s. The archive grew out of the collection of materials gathered by Apatity-based artist Alexander Zaitsev. Other contributors have included artists Igor Klyushkin, Igor Tereshchuk, and Fedor Mukhametshin; participants and witnesses of art events and practices in the region since the 1990s Margarita Momotova, Natalia Ermolenko, Evgenia Patsia, Igor Voitekhovsky, Tatyana Chaikovskaya, Irina Sitdikova, Olga Yusupova, and Ravil Yusupov; and figures actively involved in the local art scene in the 2010s and the 2020s, such as Sergei Danilin, Roman Kamilov, and others. I am very grateful to everyone who supported me and generously shared their knowledge and documents. During these years, Apatity became my home and my refuge in a time of turmoil, a place where I invariably encountered wonderful, sincere, and openhearted people devoted to art. I am glad that I have been able to contribute to the writing and study of the history of art and creative communities in this town.
Apatity on the Cultural Map of the Arctic
One idea about Apatity commonly shared by its residents is that it has a lot of creative people [1].
Situated in the heart of Murmansk Oblast and surrounded by large factories and research institutions, the young town of Apatity has acted as a magnet on the cultural map of the Arctic since the mid-1960s. In those years, young people—most of them researchers, experts in engineering and construction, chemistry and mining—started coming to Apatity. The first creative initiatives emerged in an intellectually saturated environment, as many young people turned to art practices. Professional artists and members of official artists’ associations came to visit from major regional centers (Leningrad, Murmansk) and the Soviet republics.
Apatity had no institutions specializing in contemporary art, nor did it have a branch of the Artists’ Union or another official arts association. Nevertheless, for years participants of the local art scene—mostly non-professional artists—founded their own art initiatives, such as Spolokh, Master, and Gallery M, and organized exhibitions and informal meetings. Events took place in public spaces as well as venues such as the Polyarny Cinema or the Gladilina Library, sometimes organized independently and sometimes supported by the Kola Science Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the local authorities or private art patrons and institutions.
The size and makeup of Apatity's art associations shifted throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. High social mobility was in general typical of the northern industrial regions, with many people arriving for short periods of time. The outward migration during the recession and the years that followed influenced both the structure and the atmosphere of the art scene. However, many of the artists who left maintained a connection with Apatity, frequently returning to visit and regularly taking part in local cultural events.
In the 1990s, the era of glasnost and a new curiosity about the region's own art, artists from Murmansk Oblast—which borders the Nordic countries—began actively collaborating with colleagues in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. During those years, artists also searched for new formats for working together (one purpose was to attract funding). In 1991, Gallery M, the first commercial gallery in the Russian Arctic, opened in Apatity. It is still active today, although not in the same format.
Despite the abundance of information, there have been few systematic studies on the history of art and creative communities in Apatity, primarily due to the lack of institutional support and professional art historians and curators. Although a lot has been done to create a comprehensive narrative about local art in Murmansk (mainly at Murmansk Region Museum of Art), the Murmansk art scene developed separately: despite their proximity, artists from Murmansk and Apatity like to emphasize their belonging to one scene and distance themselves from the other, often speaking about their differences. Leaving the relationship between the two centers aside, I will focus on the development of the art scene in Apatity and tools that may be useful in writing a history of art in this “unusual and non-provincial town,” drawing on various initiatives without attempting to rate or evaluate them.
In Search of a Lost Riff: Remembering Exhibitions as a Tool for the Reconstruction of Local Art History
(Written in collaboration with Marina Pugina)
In 2021 and 2022, the team of Siyanie Center for Contemporary Art and I worked together with curator Marina Pugina, who had previously studied the local art scene in Perm. In 2022, we organized the exhibition Apatity: Local Art History in the Early 1990s, which took place at Siyanie and explored the first exhibition of the local art initiative Gallery M in 1991 (Art in The Time of a Coup) [6].
After the opening, we continued our long conversations and interviews with artists and locals interested in art, and through them collected unique materials from private archives. We saw personal stories unfold against the backdrop of the 1990s political and social crisis—stories of long-standing friendships, love, the birth of creative collectives, and tragic losses, such as the death of artist Igor Chaikovsky—an important figure on the local art scene, whose passing was a very sad event for Apatity.
During perestroika, many creative initiatives that had until then been underground or only partly visible got the opportunity to work openly. At that time the art association Master emerged in Apatity. “In 1986, we created an association we called Master,” artist Igor Klyushkin recalls. “It had around twenty artists from Kirovsk and Apatity. It was a good time: everything was just beginning to take shape… When Master was formed, people were really excited about it. We organized talks and performances. We had several street exhibitions, as we had heard of similar ones in Moscow. One of them took place during Easter, and we made this allusion to a crucified artist. Religion was not yet so popular and one could get away with such gestures. The artists in Master were all young and up for experiments.
Later, Master transformed into the first private gallery in the Russian Arctic. Only the capital “M” remained from the old title, and the idea behind it changed dramatically. From the very first exhibition, the artists chose to focus on works that responded to the issues of the time. “Then it was 1991,” says Klyushkin. “On August 19, 1991, I flew back to Apatity from St. Petersburg together with Igor Chaikovsky. We had an unusual job to get on with: stained-glass windows at a children’s library. At the airport, we were dumbfounded when they tried to arrest us. There was all this talk of what was happening in Moscow (the 1991 coup attempt), but nobody knew for sure. Igor’s friends, who were helping us open the gallery, were young entrepreneurs, and all their bank accounts were frozen. The situation was very tense. So, we decided to make topical works about what was going on. Three days later, the situation in the country returned to normal, and we thought that absolute freedom would come and decided to organize Gallery M in Apatity. The name was abbreviated from Master as a gesture of continuity. The first exhibition we organized was called Art in the Time of a Coup.”
Gallery M’s first exhibition was a great success, and after Apatity it travelled to St. Petersburg and Murmansk. “The main task of the gallery was to promote contemporary art.” Igor Klyushkin explains. “Over the first three or four years, Igor Chaikovskys businessmen friends helped us out financially. The town provided exhibition spaces for free as we represented the new wave of artists. We renovated them ourselves. It was all driven by enthusiasm. A year later, I thought of repeating our exhibition Art in the Time of a Coup at the Museum of Political History in St. Petersburg. Everybody liked the idea and our patrons paid for the rental of the space. But when we arrived there with our works, it turned out that the Museum had nowhere to hang them. Then we decided to show our exhibition in a very long corridor that featured a huge painting, Assault on the Winter Palace. So, we hung our works around it and showed one coup against another. It all looked very spectacular together. We opened the exhibition on August 19, 1992, exactly a year after the coup attempt. Dissidents came to the preview to talk about the events of 1991. After the exhibition, the Museum kept some of our works. Towards the end of 1992, we showed a similar exhibition at Murmansk Region Museum of Art.”
The exhibition Art in the Time of a Coup became a phantom event that recurred in almost every interview we did, and Marina Pugina chose it as the starting point for our project—a riff that would help us create in the intimate space of Siyanie a platform for dialogue in the shape of an archival remembering exhibition. In September 2022 we opened the project, which featured early works from Gallery M (paintings and works on paper of the 1990s and 2000s), archival materials related to the opening of the gallery, and excerpts from TV shows that reflected the spirit of the early 1990s. Our goal was not only to present the history of the art scene in Apatity, but also to show local art as closely connected to the social and political developments of the time—to present the history of the gallery in the context of the history of the town and the country. “I thought it was symbolic that we started the conversation about the local art scene from the crisis of the 1990s,” says Marina Pugina, “a time of radical transformations, turmoil, and hope. The history of art has time and again showed how sociopolitical crises become catalysts for great developments in art.”
Our goal was to provide a platform for expression that would encourage the forming of new connections between local groups and generations and we also wanted to help build a relationship between the new contemporary art center and local communities. Just as we expected, the archival exhibition triggered memories of this landmark event in the culture of Apatity. The materials gathered for the exhibition in 2022 (recollections, interviews with witnesses and participants of the 1990s art scene) and documents from private archives transferred by artist Alexander Zaitsev, academic Igor Klyushkin, and the family of collectors and art patrons Olga and Ravil Yusupov formed the core of the archive devoted to contemporary art in Apatity, which is still being compiled and revisited today.
Apatity in the Late Soviet Period: Art Practices and Everyday Life
As we interviewed the locals about to the exhibition, new details about the life of the Soviet intelligentsia in Apatity started to emerge. We discovered that creativity was a significant part of their everyday life from the ime the town was founded in 1966. This was particularly true for the younger generations of the scientific and engineering intelligentsia—for many among them, creativity was a natural everyday activity (as well as the very popular kapustniki—amateur concerts—and other leisure activities, it also included serious literary and art practices). Researcher and head of the Museum and Archive of the Exploration of the European North of Russia (from the early 1970s to 2022) Evgenia Patsia, who arrived in Apatity in the early 1970s, remembers a “particular spirit and atmosphere” in the scientific community of those years. “It was a time of creativity and enthusiasm beyond scientific interests. There were poets, writers, and artists among the scientists. The town of Apatity, where the Kola Science Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences was located, became a regional culture hub.” [9]
Since its very beginning, the Kola branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was the key local institution that supported local creative initiatives. According to local non-professional artist Alexander Zaitsev, creative events were mostly initiated by scientific workers. “Apatity really started developing only in the late 1960s. They started building an akademgorodok (“academic town”—a large scientific and research complex) and opened the first high school there. I finished school in 1968, and we were only the second class to complete it. The opportunity to show your work came when they built halls and venues. It was an intellectual town, as it grew out of an akademgorodok, and there were a lot of young people. The first exhibitions took place at the Institute of Geology. What helped was that the head of the Institute, Igor Belkov, enjoyed painting and making music. He was a geologist and mostly painted landscapes from his research trips. My elder brother was his son’s best friend, so we often spent time together with their family. When I took up drawing, Igor Belkov gave me my first box easel.”
Zaitsev worked as decorator at the Institute of Geology from the mid-1970s: he made notice boards, stands, campaign materials for memorable dates and celebrations, and objects for public spaces. He combined this work with an individual art practice and, like other artists in Apatity, had the opportunity to exhibit his works at the Institute. Former director of the Institute Yuri Voitekhovsky, a friend of many local artists, remembers that when he took on the job, he decided that “those walls needed to be home to arts as well as science.” [10]
In the 1970s, most Apatity artists were non-professionals. Few were members of professional unions. However, they aimed to show their work in official spaces and not in apartments or studios like nonconformist artists in Leningrad or Moscow did at the time. Their studios were mostly located in garages or apartments, which made working with larger formats difficult (Alexander Zaitsev recalls that you could only see small paintings and works on paper in artists’ studios). According to participants of the art events of the time, there was little non-conformist art on the scene and they rarely worked with samizdat. Formal censorship limitations meant that only the more or less conventional genres and formats, such as landscapes and still lifes, could be shown in exhibitions open to the public. The Kola branch of the Academy of Sciences often offered its spaces for exhibitions and could also facilitate the approval of a project. “At the Kola Branch, we also created an association,” Alexander Zaitsev remembers. “Lyudmila [Sazykina] was the organizer. She worked with crushed rock. Our association was called Spolokh [Flash] and it was founded in 1982. There was an artist named Tolya Bondarenko. We organized several of his exhibitions. I published a catalogue of his works. To publish a catalogue, you needed to pass the censorship. We had to use the influence of the Kola Center and the factories. To have an exhibition you always had to notify the Department of Culture. There was very little underground art around.”
As mentioned above, in order to have the opportunity to show their work and be visible to the public and fellow artists, creatives in Apatity had to form associations and collectives. The first collectives emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, Zaitsev explains, but those were connected to the neighbouring town of Kirovsk (Apatity emerged as a town later). “The first Apatity-Kirovsk group of artists consisted of Kapitonov, Vladimirov, Surikov, and Kharinsky. Later, Yura Konovalov and Valya Petrova joined them. The first exhibitions took place at the Bolshevik Cinema in Kirovsk. There was also a family of artists—Kalistratova and Lysenko.”
As well as scientific institutions, art collectives used spaces at institutions with related interests, such as the children’s art school, which collaborated with local artists. As Zaitsev remembers, “in 1976, an art association at the local art school emerged and then Master was formed in 1989. We always had several exhibitions a year.” Artist Alexander Tereshchuk, one of the founders of Gallery M and a teacher at the art school, remembers how his fellow artists invited him to collaborate on the opening of the first Arctic art gallery when they literally caught him smoking outside the school. “They asked me if I’d be the third one with them [this is an allusion to sharing a bottle of vodka], and I said yes,” he laughs [11].
In post-Soviet art, friendship and personal connections were often decisive factors in the forming of collectives and determined the nature of their activities. Apatity was no exception, and the example of the Gallery M exhibitions (most of them were group shows) demonstrates that new post-Soviet collectives brought together very different artists: some we could arguably describe as contemporary, others were closer to academic schools, applied art, and design practices.
It is no exaggeration to say that many Apatity professionals who worked in a variety of institutions were involved in creative practices, not only as participants but also as a friendly “public of svoi.” [13]. This trend developed throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when creative practices were seen as an integral part of the everyday life of a Soviet science worker or intellectual. At that time, an art scene of amateurs, not professionals, was formed. The development of that scene led to a general rise in creative activities, the forming of associations and groups, and the launch of commercial galleries. This historically conditioned penetration of creative practices into the everyday life of Apatity informed in the local population a particular view of themselves, which is reflected in their referring to Apatity as a “town of creators” in conversations as well as in the media.
Footnotes
1. This idea not only recurs in interviews (Alexander Zaitsev, Tatiana Chaikovskaya) but is also a common narrative in the local media and the rhetoric of the local authorities.
2. “After the collapse of the USSR, the population of Apatity shrank by 37% (in 2020, compared to 1989). This was due to migration (specifically, the migration of the working-age population) on the one hand, and natural population aging on the other. The first factor was particularly noticeable in the 1990s.” Баранова Л., Шохина А., Шубина Д. Апатиты и депопуляция: рассуждение о (не)актуальности документов стратегического и территориального планирования и необходимых мерах // Городские исследования и практики. 2020. Т. 5. № 1. P. 103.
3. “During the difficult period of the 1990s, Russia’s regions, and in particular several regions in the Extreme North, took important steps to transform social policies… Socially oriented innovations almost coincided in time with the creation of the Barents Region in 1993. To manage and develop it, the Barents Euro-Arctic Council (BEAC) was created, as well as Barents Regional Council (BRC), which opened up new opportunities and facilitated the development of international relations between Russia’s north-western regions and the country’s Nordic neighbours, both at state and regional levels.” Тевлина В. Социально-культурное направление в трансграничной политике Норвегии и России на Крайнем Севере // Вестник Северного (Арктического) федерального университета. 2012. № 3. P. 24.
4. Important activities to preserve and systematize the Gallery M archive include Margarita Momotova and Natalia Ermolenko’s work at the Gladilina Library and the efforts of the gallery’s artists throughout the 2000s and 2010s.
5. Evgenia Patsia in an interview with Olga Shirokostup, 2022. Olga Shirokostup archive.
6. “I first came to Apatity in winter 2022 on a research residency… During my short visit, Olga invited me to discuss what a project on the city’s local art history could look like. Aware of how sensitive the local art scene was to any intervention, we wanted to approach the subject very delicately and start working with the local people as quickly as possible. We did not want to speak on their behalf. Our aim was to speak to them and about them, complementing their personal stories with documents and artworks. The format of a traditional exhibition did not seem appropriate, so for a long time the project had the working title The Archive Corner.” From the correspondence between Marina Pugina and Olga Shirokostup, 2023. Olga Shirokostup archive.
7. See, for example, Sasha Obukhova’s interview with art historian Leonid Bazhanov, in which he describes the launch of the non-professional art association Ermitazh in Moscow. URL: russianartarchive.net/ru/catalogue/document/V13387.
8. Reesa Greenberg describes this phenomenon as a riff: “The riff uses an historic exhibition as a take-off point, often privileging a contemporary connection or interpretation”// Гринберг Р. Архивные выставки-воспоминания // Сборник текстов Московской кураторской летней школы. Делать выставки политически. М.: V–A–C Press, 2016. P. 390.
9. Evgenia Patsia in an interview with Olga Shirokostup, 2022. Olga Shirokostup archive.
10. “On the fourth floor, there was a large gallery, and I decided that it would host regular exhibitions by local artists. If you read the Institute’s magazine Tietta from those years, you will find reviews of exhibitions and texts about artists on the final pages. Inspired by our conversations with Igor Chaikovsky, I decided to create a space to bring art and science closer together. Next to the gallery there was a hall where we had concerts.” Yuri Voitekhovsky, from an interview with Marina Pugina, 2022. Garage Archive Collection (Apatity Art Scene archive)
11. Alexander Tereshchuk in an interview with Olga Shirokostup, 2024. Garage Archive Collection (Apatity Art Scene archive).
12. “Friendship is the last refuge of culture in a situation of institutional, ideological, and moral vacuum. Indeed, one of the most direct consequences of the institutional and symbolic crisis in the Eastern Europe was the crisis of any impersonal forms of legitimizing art practices. Interestingly, in the Soviet years, impersonal factors called to life not only official art but also alternative culture.” Viktor Misiano. Институционализация дружбы // Художественный журнал. 2000. № 28–29.
13. “…A new form of Soviet public life took the shape of communities that we have described as ‘the public of svoi [one’s own people]…,’ and which the late Soviet generations often referred to as ‘normal people’ or ‘svoi’… In a now-classic discussion of the concept of the public, Michael Warner defines a ‘public’ as a self-organized sociality that comes into existence by being addressed in a discourse’—a public which, according to Warner, comprises people who see a particular discourse as being addressed to them.” Alexei Yurchak. Это было навсегда, пока не кончилось. Последнее советское поколение. М.: Новое литературное обозрение, 2014. С. 562.
