Studio Studies is a series of video interviews with St. Petersburg artists and a logical continuation of the work with the artists' studios, which was launched as part of the 1st Curatorial Forum. Then, in the fall of 2019, the artists of St. Petersburg opened the doors of their studios to the public. The program called Open Studios raised important questions about the ethics of visiting and hospitality, the attitude of the artist and the public, and the very essence of these private spaces.

In 2020, we continued to work with the studios, now in an exploratory way, to clarify for ourselves, the audience, and the artists the designated "blind spots". We revised the format of open studios in favor of videos about the artist's life in the studio. This decision was also forced by the epidemiological situation, in which we think it is right to avoid mass visits to the studios.

The example of the first curatorial forum showed that St. Petersburg has a lot of studios, but they exist in an inaccessible area, which makes them closer in this sense to the anachronistic romantic view of the studio as a place of sacred action. We do not quite understand how to visit them, how to behave, we do not know the expectations of the artist, and in general we do not have enough information about what it means for an artist to have his own studio.

Calling the series Studio Studies, we appeal to an already existing field of knowledge, relatively developed in European and American art criticism. Studio Studies is an area of knowledge that explores the artist's studio as an ecosystem of aesthetic and material production, and as a place that defines the entire future cultural process. We asked questions about the artist's daily life, looked at internal processes and relations with the outside world, i.e. we were engaged in topology and ethics of these special spaces.

Based on a research perspective, we invited artists representing different types of contemporary art: painters, graphic artists, sculptors, photographers, media artists, activists, etc. in order to see, perhaps, the specific routine of each direction.


Curator: Anna Zavediy