Zine as an Exhibition: postcovid

POSTCOVID

ZINE AS AN EXHIBITION

<about the project>

Zine as an Exhibition: Postcovid is a special project of the 2nd Curatorial Forum. In the form of the open contest, which took place in the summer of 2020, curators were invited to come up with an exhibition on the pages of the printed edition and media to it. Translating the exhibition into the zine format, we ask – what will remain of the exhibition in the process of such translation, and what will be fundamentally untranslatable? What does such an exhibition produce and for whom? What mechanisms are opened for co-creation? And can we call the result exhibition?

The viewer, and precisely – the reader, will see black and white zine exhibitions not in the exhibition hall, but will be able to take them for free in public spaces of St. Petersburg or get them delivered my post.

First Zine

+ Displaced activity - Curator - Lera Lerner, artists - Sasha Zubritskaya, Roman Osminkin, Galya Yaptik, Tanya Chernomordova, Valya Lutsenko.

<when and where>

During the fall of 2020 4 zines will be published – 3 zines created by curators and one together with an interuniversity group of students who will form a kind of "series", and each of the "series" will gather and form their own audience.

In addition, art works will appear on billboards on the streets of St. Petersburg – a kind of intervention of artists in the urban space.

Zine (originally "fanzine", – fan magazine –amateur magazine) – is a self-made small circulation periodical. For the first time zines appeared in North America in the 1930s among fans of science fiction, and by the 1980s formed a whole zine culture, covering different topics (from punk rock to soccer and politics) and different continents. Independent publishing houses appeared, specializing only in zines and even in zine fairs and exhibitions. Despite the fact that today zines are quite a familiar format for different and even, paradoxically, quite commercial projects, they still remain an alternative to mainstream culture and become a platform for experiments and expressions of interests and manifestations of different communities and subcultures.

<curators of the project>

Alina Belishkina – curator, artist and educator. Lives in St. Petersburg and Helsinki. Her current research interests include the effects and affects of curatorial gestures, documentation as an interdisciplinary and speculative type of practice, and the production of community spaces.

Natalia Khvoenkova is the Head of the Art Programs Department at the National Center for Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg and Program Director of the Curatorial Forum. Curator, art manager and an art historian.