In her author's column “The Locker Room”, Olga Tsipenyuk meets another MH hero immediately after a workout and calls him - warm and relaxed - for a frank conversation: first about the workout itself, and then about everything in the world. In this issue, her counterpart is Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich, artist and director of the State Gallery on Solyanka.

How often do you come here at the Republica gym?
When I respect myself, then five times a week. But there are circumstances. I'm almost a flight attendant, I fly all the time. And on the day of the flight you can’t go to sports, only to yoga. Because the flight is a weakening of the immune system. When you fly, you still get sick. And when you get sick, you can’t exercise, otherwise you will get seriously ill. Flying is bad as hell - since I sometimes make four transatlantic flights a month, I know everything about it. This is how it was bequeathed by Maria Candida de Melo, my Brazilian healthy lifestyle doctor. First, never eat junk food. Everything that is fed on the plane is cooked no one knows when, and then brought to the aircraft environment. In this environment, at best, 30 percent of the air is ventilated - when the doors are briefly opened on the ground. The rest of the time it is inhabited by what the passengers inhaled - many interesting reptiles that have not been fully studied by science. By the way, this food is the cause of many post-aircraft ailments. But the main problem is not even the food itself - during the flight, all the insides are squeezed, only a fifth of the volume of the stomach works, and it can cope with little - at best, with pureed soup, but it is rarely given on airplanes.

And how do you get out?
Every airport I visit often has a trusted restaurant in the departure area. I eat there, right before the flight. Tested and proven by the stomach: nothing is broken this way. And eat at least a piece of airplane food - a skiff. You can test everything on my stomach, it's like a crystal vase: just a little - goodbye.

Temporary Monument 7 (Sao Paulo), photo by Guilherme Licurgo

Food is clear. What other air commandments?
On intracontinental flights - for example, Sao Paulo - Buenos Aires, only 2.5 hours - it is supposed to drink a liter of liquid. It's not very easy, but it's important. I always bring a thermos bottle with me on the plane and packets of organic ginger-lemon tea, or rose hips. I take a couple of slices of lemon from the stewardess, throw them into a thermos, pour boiling water - after an hour it is not so hot anymore, you can drink it. You start running to the toilet towards the end of the flight, so it's normal.

A liter in two hours? Legs don't swell?
I put a small suitcase at my feet, which they are allowed to take into the salon. Well, or I’m completely impudent: I take a seat at the emergency exit in the first row and put my feet on the unfolded seat of the stewardess, having previously made friends with her.

Trying to imagine myself as that flight attendant.
Oh yeah! They all hope to marry me, and the elderly - to adopt. I am the case that suits all options: young I seem young, and the elderly are able to discern experience in my eyes - which means I can become their third marriage, which, as you know, is forever. Gay stewards hope for their own in me - I smile at them! - and now they will start dancing, like in Almodovar's film. I once flew in an empty British plane along the magical Almaty-London route. There were three passengers, a handsome young man - I was alone, and five stewards, all gay men over fifty, wildly flirtatious. They didn't know, of course, that I was only ten years younger. Imagine what it was like for me.

Hiding in the toilet?
I did not hide, I enjoyed the care and adoration. I don't care who adores me - I love it. Okay, let's move on about health. On the transatlantic, you need to drink 2 liters. When I fly to Pavlik - in the sense of Sao Paulo - it's at least 11, or even 13-15 hours, from Doha - all 16. My body is already trained. I go in and before takeoff I am cut down tightly. I sleep 10-11 hours almost non-stop. I wake up. I do pranayama and shadkarma. I drink a liter of hot water with lime. Then I do asanas for an hour - there is such a place, between the cabins, the senior flight attendant, with whom you need to agree on this, always allows. I often fly Turkish, so Turkish flight attendants gather and discuss me, sometimes they clap. Then I drink a protein shake. After that, I again drink water frantically and, if completely unbearable, eat oatmeal cookies - I buy boxes in London and always carry them in my backpack - because you can’t starve, Maria Candida did not order. From the moment I met her, thanks to all these measures, I had a jetlag once in my life, although I change continents at least once a month, or even two or three.

Temporary Monument 4, photo by Igor Afrikyan

At what point did such a focus on your body appear?
The focus has always been there. But when I turned 32, I realized who I am. Not a TV presenter, not a producer, not a chief editor of magazines, not a PR man, not a microphone stand at corporate parties, that's not all. And I am an artist and my means of speaking out loud is performance.

Foundling 3, photo by Dasha Kravtsova

How did you understand it? Was there a voice? Dream? Or did it change itself and drag you on the lasso?
I worked for everything in the world, earning my frying pan in hell. He published the magazine "Hammer" - recently a fat middle-aged uncle caught me by the sleeve and said, looking strangely into my eyes: "As a child, your poster hung over my bed." I hosted corporate events and the program “Up to 16 and older”, Zhirinovsky came to my studio, and Nikas Safronov gave me a book that I tried to throw away three times, and every time the janitors brought it to me, because there was a dedication. I received money for finding a common language with the mother of my beloved Ksenia Sobchak in front of millions of viewers, and with this money I rehearsed underground performances at night. It seems that the German curator Christina Steinbrecher came to my third performance and said: listen, this is not a theater, this is a performance! And I was just thinking: why am I so mesmerized by Marina Abramovich on a horse and with a white flag? It turned out that everything that was inexplicable in me since childhood, all these standing for hours in one place, repeating different words - all this was a performance, I just didn’t know about it. And then Christina sent me to Rome for some group exhibition, where I made my first performance. Strange. The second was also strange, but already on the third - even more strange, in London - Hans-Ulrich Obrist, an outstanding curator, stuck his nose in. I sat naked on the floor and endlessly said out loud everything that was thought in my head, looking into the eyes of a sculpture made from pet rat food - and five wild rats ate this sculpture. And Obrist, like that, says: “Oh! You are what I need." So I ended up at an exhibition of ten performance artists called Marina Abramovic Presents.

AND? Has a new life begun?
Do you know how I felt then? As if I was born a transgender, I suffered all my life in a foreign gender, and then I would suddenly have a sex change operation. I kind of returned to myself, became myself. And when I understood this, peace immediately set in inside, clarity outside in many things, and the body gradually began to enter its shores. Yes, it was in 2008.

Right, not earlier? I remember how in 1992 I tried to send at least someone from Kommersant to the Austrian Alps to test sneakers of a famous brand - no one wanted to, having heard that I would have to get up at 7 in the morning and wander through the mountains. And you went like clockwork.
Well, that's because I loved everything free. And now I love. The household of one great cultural figure, now middle-aged and legendary, told me: when he returned from a tour, deposits of shower caps and tons of disposable slippers were dug out of his luggage. He is even a very rich man - it's just that the syndrome of a Soviet business traveler sits in him. I seem to have inherited it too. Therefore, when you sent me to test sneakers for free - and I was 15 years old - of course, I was delighted.

Foundling 4, photo by Marcelo Elidio

Sneakers are a great reason to return to the topic of sports. Are you training with an instructor?
I have had a coach for ten years already - a terribly competent dude, adored friend Dima Dovgan. We started with him back in Republik on Oktyabrskaya, and then moved together here, to Valovaya. He is Dorian Gray very specific. You go into the hall, look - what else is this? Why such a face - and coaching form? Dima comes from an incredibly intelligent family: dad, mom, sister and brother are all pianists. In his youth, Dima graduated from the Gnessin Academy, won competitions, but then his children began to be born one after another - now there are four of them. Fortunately, not all pianists - some violinists - also already win competitions. So Dima had to go to earn. He began to engage in Pilates and functional training. Through breathing, through gentle distribution - and with a complete ban on any chemistry - Dima achieves very fast and clear bodily results.

photo by Dasha Kravtsova

Were you originally focused not on empirical “health”, but on bodily results?
My body is an instrument. I speak through him. So I have no choice. If I don't water it, thin it out and fertilize it, the tool won't work.

Describe your average functional workout.
It always consists of two parts. First, I start the flows: I drive energy through the body, I make sure that there are no holes, so that everything is filled. I try to go to a special hall for stretching, because not all athletes understand what is happening to a person who stands with his eyes closed for a couple of minutes - and something happens to him, but what is unknown.

Are you pumping energy? I'm sorry, how - by force of will?
Well, this is not entirely about will - rather, about all sorts of myofascial affairs, no esotericism. It's just that our body is a bag: you are aware, at most, of the hands or, there, the head - and even then not always. The rest lives in ignorance and stagnation. But when you begin to pay attention to go through different nooks and crannies, to penetrate into dead corners, then everything comes to life. I never listen to music, I don’t walk around the gym with a phone - I am focused, I lead every exercise with attention and I know what I want from it. My job is not to gain weight, I don't want to pout. With a height of 190, my usual weight is 76 kilograms, my bones are very light - that is, by nature I am a total pimple. And if I stop exercising for a couple of months, I will weigh that much. And my task is to weigh 82, I have to support this.

I started the flows, dispersed the energy, what's next?
Having dispersed the strength through the body and making it filled, I stand on my hands. I stand on my hands for 16 breaths - this is already physical filling. Next comes a split - two exercises for the chest and one for the arms, either for biceps or triceps. Chest: different TRX sets, dumbbell presses on the ball, dumbbell raises at various inclines, but never a barbell.

Why don't you complain about the barbell?
The barbell is a killer, my body doesn't respond well to it. I had an injury at the age of 19 - a compression fracture of the spine: I fell on my back during the show from the podium, from a great height. Comrade jokingly pushed. I didn’t even know about this fracture, I walked with pain - I have such a pain threshold that I treat my teeth without anesthesia. After that, I have to be careful in choosing an arsenal.

Is there a regular set of exercises?
Biceps are always a drop set: I lift dumbbells with both hands, first 22.5 kg for 5 times, then 17.5 for 9-12. I do all the power things in four to five approaches, including a warm-up. The day I do triceps, I alternate four exercises with a superset: deadlifts in the machine with a reverse grip, I prefer a short bar, pulling down with my elbows pressed 12 times, now 36 kg on average. Then pull-ups: either with a very wide grip, Dima supports his legs, it turns out like in a gravitron, or a narrow grip - five sets of 8-10 times. Or there is another option: you approach the unit where the deadlift is done, lower the bar about a meter from the floor, climb under it, grab it with your hands with a reverse grip, hang and pull yourself up like that, 15 times 5 sets. Next in this split is TRX with wiring - I do it with a light weight, like 15 kg, I try to pull in the projection of the chest, putting one straight leg back on the toe, and the other forward, bent at the knee, arching my back and in no case lowering chin. And the fourth element is the buttocks. I do the so-called Romanian deadlift with 50 kilograms.

Romanian?
I think no one does this craving in Romania, all these names are like Olivier salad, which Olivier has never heard of. For example, in Portugal, hot water with a curly carved lemon is called carioca, which means “inhabitant of Rio de Janeiro”, and in Rio itself no one has ever drunk such water in their life and does not know about it. In general, a split of four elements takes 20 minutes maximum. I don't rest between sets, I like not to waste time, to be in full focus, to go through four exercises very quickly - but this is how it happens on a day when triceps. But biceps are usually ten minutes longer - the minimum split set takes half an hour.

This is the chest and arms, and the rest?
I have a divine press, I must repent to you.

Not blind, I see.
He does not need almost any care at all - I make an appointment, as they say in Brazil, once a week, if at all. As a rule, I charge for a ten-minute cycle: first, 150 oblique times in a row - I lie on the floor, placing my feet on the wall with bent knees, and twist. The second thing is right there, without getting up, 50 ups and downs on triple breathing, and then I finish it - 150 very short jerks. After that, there is a fire in the press, and you can not remember about it for another week.

Cardio?
I have naturally strong and big legs - in the Moscow metro, I can easily run up an escalator of any length through a step and almost never lose my breath. But my ass, which I am certainly proud of now, is the fruit of diligence. A fruit grown with long care. Every time I work out, I do the buttocks, because by nature my butt is flat, like a wall.

Here, I feel that girls will actively join the reading of our interview.
It's an illusion that the boys are not interested. A well-known fact: a woman looks first of all at a man's ass for some reason. Therefore, without an ass - nowhere.

And I, a scarecrow, first of all look the peasant in the eye.
By the way, I do eye exercises every night before going to sleep. This is a super important thing, it brings order to the whole body. You close your eyes. 20 hellish eye rotations clockwise, 20 against. It is important not to move any other person, otherwise everything is down the drain. The first time will be very difficult. The second exercise, they are all done with closed eyes, pupils up to the limit, then down to the limit. Third: the pupils to the left to the limit, to the right to the limit. All 20 times. After that, bliss sets in the body and you can fall asleep.

You abruptly jumped from your buttocks to your eyes.
Okay, I'm coming back. There are five exercises for the buttocks that I like. I start with the maximum weight - this is the breeding of the legs in the simulator, usually there is 70 kg - I do 12 times. It is important to breed very slowly and to the limit - then with any weight there will be a sense. Then I gradually reduce the weight - 65, then 60, two more times of 12. There are four sets of these in my split. The next exercise for the ass can be done without weight at all: lie down on the floor, put one bent leg on the bench, and lift the other straight up, and rise, straightening the lower back, 30 times on each leg. Also on the buttocks I do variations of the leg retraction with a weight of 12 kg around the leg, on such Velcro - I don’t know what this thing is called. In Russia, there are almost no such scales for calves more than 5-7 kilograms, and in Brazil in all the halls there are both 12 and 15 kg - people there take great care of their asses. In Brazil, the bigger the ass, the more honorable - because samba, because they love sex. Women these huge riches fit and stick out, gluteal implants are a super-theme for local plastic surgeons.

You said that the training consists of two parts.
The second half is asanas. I've been doing it myself lately. My teacher Kirill Chernykh, according to whom I have been checking my life for a couple of years - we met at the Yoga Class club - believes that a person can only solve problems inside his body, that you need to constantly dig into it, understand it - and everything will happen. By the way, about the distribution and acceleration of energy in the body and about filling the peripheries - he invented all this. Every time after strength training, I can hang in asanas for a good hour - at such moments you do not know what is happening around. In "Republic" there are understanding people - such a conscious atmosphere: everyone is friends with everyone, but they keep their distance, they let you be yourself. There, in fact, eight years ago I met the inhumanly beautiful Tanya Domovtseva. Tanya now seems to be over 60 - and this is one of the most beautiful women I know. Her classes, often attended by a couple of dozen people of both sexes, are a hand that supports everyone who takes her classes, regardless of the number of participants. Tanya taught me a lot. She herself took up yoga already in adulthood, at the age of 38, her system is very competent and wise, very attentive. If suddenly, after strength training, I don’t want to do it myself, then I go to group yoga either to Tanya right in the Republic, or to the new Material club, which was opened by another important yoga person in my life - Anya Lunegova. In general, yoga after a workout is mandatory for me - I don’t remember that I scored on it.

You speak with such passion and in such detail about the physical... How much time per day do you devote to your body in total?
I devote all my time to the body. Because I am always in it at the moment of my physical life - and I want to feel and hear it. And if you are talking about practices, then in the morning I do all sorts of breathing things - not for long, 5-10 minutes, and I do some simple things before going to bed. When I don’t go to the gym, I try to do asanas at home for half an hour. In the summer, I always disappear for three weeks in an embrace with Sveta - this is my surfboard, I have been racing for more than 15 years. During these three weeks I try to make asanas softer and deeper, I catch waves for several hours a day, and the rest of the time I write texts and come up with my new works, this is always a very important period for me.

What do you eat? The question is lengthy, but the answer, I think, will not be long - there, flower pollen, morning dew and a wormy apple, bought exclusively from the old woman who raised it. Right?
It's funny that I have exactly three wormy apples in my backpack right now. It's just a given - my body does not accept a lot of edible things: immediately something starts to hurt or itch.

So I'm asking - what do you eat?
From non-vegetable food I eat only eggs - I try to buy organic - and products from goat or sheep's milk. Goats and sheep are not bred in industrial quantities, so they are not stuffed like cows with hormones and other rubbish. Goat cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt - in Brazil I make it myself, I buy milk on the farm. And then - anything from which you can get protein: lentils and other beans, nuts - not all, I'm allergic to many, for example, peanuts and cashews.

When was the last time you drank alcohol?
Yesterday. I can take a couple of sips of white wine. But of all the drugs, I like the smell of marijuana the most. I like the smell, but I don't like smoking. So I do not drink, I do not smoke, I have one serious vice: I am very dependent on sex. Born like this. As a child, I lined up girls and boys in the kitchen of the kindergarten, and they all took off my panties at three or four. It is very difficult to find a person in my age category in Moscow - from those who went to the Houses of Creativity of the Writers' Union or the Union of Theater Workers, or hung out somewhere - whom I did not persuade to acts of a sexual nature. Not to mention adults: as a child, I was a “pedophile on the contrary” - a 34-year-old aunt who worked in a pioneer organization and took me 13 to shoot for the Marathon-15 program, in which I then worked, a long time later about this sorry. Now it's the other way around. Nowadays, at the age of 40, people are usually already destroyed. Sexually, emotionally and, most importantly, physically.

Everything is destroyed, and here you are - a bulk apple, yeah.
Wormy all the same - because organic. And this worm is an as yet undiscovered means of redistributing the energy of sex. But it will be found, I believe - I am working in this direction.

Do you nurture yourself so physically, including because of sex?
As for why I cherish myself, these are all things clinging to each other. Fitness is about eternal life. Which, of course, can break off at any moment - and here you are lying like this, all embossed and bumpy, in a box, and no one can even admire you, because you are covered with a veil and dressed in half a shirt. And everyone looks and thinks: “And under the clothes! He tried so hard - and all in vain. Therefore, from the point of view of mortality, it is better not to deal with the body, but to let it wither away in peace. Another question is that I have a job! My work, my body, my sexual energy are all the same. My work is about the truth, about what really worries me.

And sex is obviously not the last thing on the list of things that bother you.
Sex comes first. This must be honestly acknowledged.

A portrait with the artist and void, photo by Gustavo von Ha

Is the choice of Brazil as one of the base points of your dwelling also somehow connected with it?
No. But as soon as you decide to be honest with yourself, many things start to happen without your will. Therefore, when I went outside for the first time in Rio 10 years ago and breathed in the air, I immediately understood: this is my land, my people, my language, my culture, my body. I opened my mouth - and my tongue flew into it: I spoke within a week. He raised his leg - and she was already taking a samba step. In three days in Rio or in Pavlik - Sao Paulo - I become myself. Brazilians have a completely different attitude towards sex than the rest of the world. On my recent birthday, my friends and girlfriends and I went on a boat to a nearby island in Rio. All my friends swelled up a little - and here we are lying on the deck of the boat, all embracing, rejoicing in the sun, the sea, each other, and somehow we want to hug each other even more strongly and all that. At some point, I realize that the driver of the boat is looking at us from behind the glass. I feel embarrassed for a moment. We swim back, go ashore, and I say to him: “Aristeu, brother, I'm sorry that we are like this. It's embarrassing for you!" And he’s like, “What are you doing! It was so beautiful! So awesome! I admired! But at the same time, the Brazilians have a wild shame of nudity. A girl can put on dental floss instead of panties and stick a couple of brushes on her nipples - she will already be considered dressed. And here I am getting out of the box after my performance "Foundling" in Sao Paulo - everyone covers their faces in horror with their hands.

So why are you worried about sex?
Sex is wonderful. This is an important part of life, without it nowhere, it leads and drives everything. My favorite recent news item on Brazilian sites was from a small town in the state of Pernambuco. There, the robber prepared to attack the house - a gun, a mask with holes for the eyes, everything. The couple living in the house planned a sex party for that evening - another couple came to visit them, and the third couple was late. And this robber de-energizes the house, climbs out the window - in a mask, with a gun. And there is just an active prelude going on. He is immediately thrown onto the bed, undressed, he becomes part of the orgy. And his plans change, because sex is the most important thing.

Temporary Monument 5, photo by Pedro Agilson

The body is your tool, nudity is your language, sex is your engine. Can you use these tools to explain to your children how the world works?
My children - I think they will be born with me soon - will receive a complete picture of the world. If they were born to me at the age of 17, as I originally wanted, they would not be very lucky, because they would be in a fever with me. And now I am almost completely ready for them - I know how and what to tell them, where to lead by the hand. I have five nephews and nieces, three great-nephews - I trained on them. But they will become vegetarians only if they want to. Nothing will dictate to them.

What experiences of your own would you like to protect them from?
From the snout trade.

Are you ashamed of your media past?
On the contrary, I am having fun. “Welcome to the studio of the talk show “The Price of Success”, we, your presenters, Lyudmila Narusova and I, Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich!” ... I am not ashamed for a minute. It was just the chemical composition of my blood then. I confused performance with climbing into a TV box. It was the wrong box. Now I have the right one: glass, almost as cramped, but a little not as flat as modern TVs.

Is the "golden shower" on Midsummer Night's Dream the right box?
I make a lot of decisions in my life. So I put a shower on him and went to Midsummer. This holiday is made by my close friends and I could not miss it - then it was their wedding anniversary. All my large Moscow family came there - it was impossible to appear in an elf costume, you understand? Any costume I wear automatically becomes part of my job, I can't "just dress up". Then the work of Dickorders for the Venice Performance Week grew out of this carnival costume - and there this idea finally became live art. It's just a performance - it's about the zero mark of meaning, about insides turned inside out.

Os Caquis, photo by Pedro Agilson

Turning inside out - in the name of what? What is important for you to tell people through your artistic experience?
There are things that, with a linear way of talking, will take hours or years, and art can explain them in a second, in a click. Sometimes for this it brings down its victim, knocks it to the floor, rapes, possesses it. This has happened to me several times with contemporary art. Once I became a victim of Tino Segal, just in Rio de Janeiro. After the woman who participated in his performance left me, who simply told me a piece of her life - not tragic, not even sad at all - I stood in an empty museum, leaning against a column and sobbed for half an hour, as if I was being beaten from the inside, pounded and cleaned. Some time ago the same thing happened at the Theater of Nations, I went to see Peter Brook - a short hour-long performance of the Mahabharata. At the twentieth minute, I shed tears. And then I flooded the floor, the walls, the whole theater, my friend looked at me in horror - well, we were mistakenly put in a government box. Also, by the way, an erection can come from cool art that has nothing to do with erotica. That is, your own body begins to offer you different ways of extreme response - because it does not have another, more relevant echo to the received signal.

And now you are so crystal-muscular, press-to-heaven, crying at other people's performances, talking to people with your body. But you didn't answer the question, what do you want?
I don't want anything at all. Some work can be done in the field, in the forest, in the middle of the sea, on the mountain. When no one sees. I need to understand why I'm here. And where do I go next.

Dickorders, photo by Alexander Harbaugh

Then why are you looking for an answer with the help of the audience? Why don't you lie like a foundling in a field or forest, trying to understand why you are here?
If thirty people came to my performance in Moscow, I jump for joy. Because even among my friends there are few who are able to stick. And no one is to blame. You can't bring a reindeer herder from Kamchatka - who was born and will die in a yurt - to the Bolshoi Theater to listen to the opera: he will think that a woman is giving birth on the stage, he will climb to help.

Why? If they sing well, he will have an erection.
There is one thousandth of a percent of art, which, not being a part of everyday life familiar to every spectator, will be understood by everyone. Here is Pyotr Pavlensky - he nailed himself by the balls to Red Square and every village, every prison and hospital knows about it. It is clear that 98 percent believe that his place is not in France, but in a psycho-neurological boarding school. But it doesn't matter at all. My main favorite, Caravaggio, was also in prison - and almost no one understood him either. And he was a performer, of course. And Goya, my other idol. Nothing has changed since then!

Do you put these three in a row? And how about yourself, do you want to be remembered - like Pavlensky or like Goya?
I want to look in the mirror and not be ashamed. I want to wake up and not think I'm doing shit. I want to not lie to myself. I want to love every minute of my life what is happening around, or at least accept it. If at the same time they accidentally know me - well, they won’t - so much the better for me. You know, at the height of my talk shows on federal TV channels, I flew from Sochi to Moscow, and a young lady ran after me through the entire airfield shouting: “Stop! Stop! I really need your signature!” She ran up to me, opened a notebook and said: “So. First here, then on the chest. Write to Angela from Anton. She mistook me for Anton Komolov. In general, I think it would be better if they didn’t know me - it would be much better for me to think that way. They may, so be it, find out later - when I'm quite old. Well, or when I am reborn into something more intelligible.

Olga Tsipenyuk

Since 2009, Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich has been the head of the State Gallery on Solyanka in Moscow - artist-run space (art space managed by the artist) and the only center in Russia for performance art and films by artists. Fedor is also an artist, curator and theater director.

Since childhood, since 1989, Fedor has been working as a TV presenter, and also publishes magazines (Kvadrat, and later Don't Sleep!, I'm Young, Molotok, Citizen-K). In the late 1990s, he began producing projects in the field of contemporary culture. In 2004, Fedor released his first work as a theater director - and since then he has staged a dozen and a half performances in Russia and abroad. Since 2012, Fedor has been working with the Vs. Meyerhold in Moscow, releasing a series of projects in the "drama dance" genre. The play "Beefem" based on the play by L. Petrushevskaya (2003) received the Grand Prix of the New Drama festival, and the Yakut opera "Old Women" based on the text by D. Kharms (2009) was awarded two nominations for the national award "Golden Mask". Having completely broken with television and media in the mid-2000s, since 2008 Fedor has been focusing on his artistic work, mainly in the field of performance and installation.

Among his artistic works - "Hygiene" (The Hygiene, 2009), performance at the gallery Deitch Projects (New York); My Mouth Is a Temple, 2009, installation/performance as part of Marina Abramovic Presents, Manchester International Festival, UK curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Maria Balshaw; Egobox (2010), installation/performance at the International Performance Festival, curated by Klaus Biesenbach and RoseLee Goldberg, Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; My Water Is Your Water (2010), installation/performance at the Luciana Brito Galeria under the auspices of the São Paulo Biennale, curated by Maria Montero, São Paulo, Brazil ; The Great Vodka River (2010), installation/performance, curated by Katya Krylova, as part of the Art Public program curated by Patrick Charpenel at Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, USA; "Laughter/Death" (Laughterlife, 2013), solo exhibition and performance, curated by Marcio Harum at the Casa Modernista Museum of the Sao Paulo Cultural Center, Brazil (Casa Modernista, Centro Cultural Sao Paulo);(Fyodor’s Performance Carousel, 2014), installation and performance, curated by Ximena Faena and Marcello Pisu, Faena Arts Centre, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Batatodromo (O Batatodromo, 2015), installation and performance at the Cultural Center of the Bank of Brazil, Brasilia, Brazil (CCBB Brasilia, Brasil), curated by Marcello Dantes. In 2016, the second"Carousel of performances by Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich"— installation and performance by 9 performance artists, curated by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein (Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna).

The installation and performance "O Batatodromo" was shortlisted for the 10th Arte Laguna Prize (2016) and the performance was presented as part of an exhibition in Arsenale, Venice.

In 2015"Carousel of performances by Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich"was awarded the Grand Prix of the Kuryokhin International Prize for Multimedia Art (shared with Ragnar Kjartansson ( Ragnar Kjartasson).

His work was included in the collection “Marina Abramovic and the Future of Performance Art” (2010), which was published by one of the main publishers Prestel, specializing in books about art, architecture and design. Also, the works of Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich were included in the edition of ‘Visionaire 25’, Rizzoli (2016).



Russian artist Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich staged a "naked performance" at the Met Gala 2017 in New York

The Ukrainian journalist Vitaliy Sedyuk, who regularly causes a stir in secular society (you can read about all his "tricks" with the participation of stars), has a serious competitor. Journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Molotok weekly, and now performance artist Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich appeared at the Met Gala 2017 in New York completely naked.

Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich appeared at the Met Gala in the midst of the evening - when the paparazzi lined up to meet the stars. They waited for Beyoncé, who never arrived, but a 41-year-old Russian performance artist, closed with 18 screws in a glass box with small air holes, exposed his naked body to the public. Carried it to the Met Gala by four accomplices, creative like-minded people. They set up and retreated, leaving the guards and the stars who had already arrived on the red carpet in bewilderment. It was not immediately possible for the guards to work quickly, lifting the box with a total weight of 100 kilograms. They hid the nakedness of the "foundling" with a white sheet, and after that they decided what to do with it.

Only by dragging the "object" to a safe distance and cutting the box (otherwise the artist refused to go out), the situation was resolved: Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich was arrested and taken to the police. True, after 22 hours they were released. They did not find a reason for detention in the actions of the artist: in the box he was grouped in a position that excluded the demonstration of the genitals.

The action of Pavlov-Andreevich has the name "Foundling" and glorified him in certain circles for a long time, but he stormed New York with his naked performance for the first time. Lie down in a transparent glass box, curled up in a fetal position, and appear in this form to the world, or rather to the elite of this world, Pavlov-Andreevich came up with a few years ago. He made the first "Foundling" during the 56th Venice Biennale, then appeared in obscene form at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Culture in Moscow, at a party at Christie's auction house in London and at the Biennale in Sao Paulo. artist, he planned a series of five performances, so that the performance in New York was the last.

- Most recently, the Russian media widely circulated about your action "Foundling-5" at the annual Met Gala in New York. It was reported that you were dragged away by the police. How did this story end?


I have no right to comment until the trial, which is scheduled for June 5th. I was arrested and put in jail for a day. And accordingly, they were released from the courtroom. I went through four counts: insulting public opinion, disobeying the police, spreading panic, and breaking into private property. For every point, my lawyer has a serious answer, the director of the Brooklyn Museum wrote a big conclusion that my performance is a serious work of art, and the Met museum in this situation looks so-so. The story will end at the moment when the trial takes place, which will either cancel the charges or pronounce a verdict. Until then, it's hard to predict anything.

- Were you prepared for this development?

No, it wasn't at all. I've done this performance four times before and it never ends like this.

- What cities make up the geography of your daily life? In your Snob profile, you indicated Moscow, Sao Paulo and London as your place of residence. How relevant is this?


This is so: I am divided between these three cities. But there are others as well. I can say that I live nowhere - or that I live in my own body, because I am constantly moving. But Moscow, of course, is still the main point, because I am working on Solyanka and I need to be here all the time, working on exhibitions, on future projects. Well, my theater is mostly here. At the same time, I currently have a large exhibition at MAC USP, the Museum of Contemporary Art in the city of Sao Paulo, and a project in London is also being prepared. New York may be another such city for me, I don't know, everything will depend on the decision of the court. If they pass a guilty verdict there, they will simply close the entrance to me. I often go to other places as well. For example, I have a lot going on in Venice lately. By the way, I don’t know if you have noticed: if you go to some group international exhibition of contemporary art today, you can see how on the labels next to the art objects it says: “The artist is such and such, was born in such and such a year, lives between Nairobi and Santiago de Chile. Or "between Nuremberg and Beirut." Lots of wonderful combinations - the weirder, the more sexy it sounds. It seems to me that people are running away from the situation of attachment to one place. Today the world is so unsettling. People want to find a calm - although sometimes, on the contrary, restless - the most suitable place where they will feel good. True, according to my observations, no matter where a person lives, he always complains. I know very few people who would be happy with the place where they live. Either the weather, or the crisis, or crime, or the lack of culture, or the over-dominance of culture, no modern architecture, too much modern architecture - there is always something to complain about. Therefore, people are constantly looking for a place for themselves. Bad everywhere. And good, too, everywhere. We can say that such is the modern consciousness. Frequent movement cancels this discontent. I only have time to miss Brazil - I begin to yearn after two weeks spent outside this my now completely native country. But I almost never miss Moscow or London. Only for your family and your pets - you want to carry them with you in a suitcase.

"Andante" at the Center. Meyerhold, 2016.

© Lika Gomiashvili

- Do you have to somehow divide your activities into categories? Today is an exhibition, tomorrow is a festival, there is a performance, here is a performance? Or is it all one big process in which everything is interconnected?

- For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from severe Attention Deficit Disorder since early childhood, and the division of activities is a way to cope with it. I do different things. I curate exhibitions or organize some projects in the space of modern culture - all this today is completely beyond categorization. For example, my installation “Fyodorʼs Performance Carousel”: now we will have the third episode in Sao Paulo, at the Sesc art center, the previous one was a year ago in Vienna, two years before in Buenos Aires . This project requires a colossal effort of managerial brains: you need to find money, gather artists and explain to everyone what kind of absolutely unknown format this is. Three visitors sit on exercise bikes arranged around the carousel, pedaling and changing every five minutes - and inside the carousel, nine artists make performances for five hours a day for at least a week. This is all very strange. I do not have a large managerial staff who would do everything for me, and never will - it is very important to deal with the organizational process yourself. In the next couple of months, I will have to fiddle, for example, with an estimate for the “Performance Elevator” (“Performance Elevator”) project at the Fierce festival in Birmingham: there, in a single new business center, five elevators will go up and down with artists inside, and the artists will to make performances averaging only one minute in length. This is a live installation, I myself will also ride there in an elevator with my own live work, but I also have to figure out who these other artists will be, what works will fall into this format and how it will all interact with each other. For me, these tasks are curious, they provide a certain kind of brain massage. In parallel, I am actively involved in calculating the cost of the "Performance Train" ("Performance Train") in New York. And of course, I am immersed in much more ephemeral things almost daily - and this is already very difficult to standardize or lead to some kind of schedule. Basically, the things that need to be solved in an artistic sense happen in your head when you are half asleep. I have such a system: I need to wake up a little and go back to sleep, not immediately - and at that moment everything will be decided. Therefore, I really love jet lag, this uneven sleep, when after five or six hours you open your eyes, not waking up completely, but half-awake. At times like these, answers to the most difficult questions come very well.

Installation "Carousel of performances"

- In one of the interviews, you said that you got into performance from the theater. What is this story?

I started doing performance because one day, in 2008, curator Christina Steinbrecher came to see me at a performance. It was the first experience of fast theater, when I changed actors almost every day. The project was called "Hygiene", it was then held in the Giusto club, where the Workshop Theater was later located. We played a certain text by Petrushevskaya twice a day. Every day new people came to play it. Very different people went through this - Iosif Bakshtein, Tanya Drubich, Anton Sevidov, who is now known for Tesla Boy, excellent Vasilyevsky choristers (artists of the choir of the Anatoly Vasilyev theater "School of Dramatic Art." - Note. ed.). All amazing people, very different in the acting sense. Everyone read the text - but they read it from the screen, which the audience did not know about, because the screen hung behind their heads, hidden. There was a feeling that the actors were terribly tense, and this is exactly what I wanted. All my life in the theater I have been clumsily fighting the Stanislavsky system. I clumsily try to make my theater as formal as possible. My task, relatively speaking, is to force the actor to squeeze a nickel between the buttocks. How singers are sometimes taught. So that all this looseness, gutturalness, mask - everything is gone, including all sorts of fussing with the muzzle of the face, which depresses me the most in the drama theater. In general, thanks to the text on the hidden screens, there was a feeling that the artists were very concentrated, they were all looking at one point. And they just soared that now they will pronounce something wrong. Because no one showed them the lyrics before they went on stage, they only rehearsed the movement pattern. And then Christina Steinbrecher, a German curator of Russian origin, came, looked and said: “Oh, Fed, you are doing performance art.” I say, "In what sense?" She says: “Well, what I just saw is not a theater.” I say: "Cool, I did not know." She says: “Come on, there will be an exhibition of young art in Rome, come and do work there.” I was so happy - at that moment I was very confused in my life. Work as a TV presenter, marketing, PR, all this crap that happened to me before that all my life, some magazines, newspapers - I didn’t understand what I was doing, I got lost. And the theater was the only place where I clearly knew what I was fighting and what I was trying to go for - at least on an intuitive level. So Christina invited me to that exhibition, and a gallery owner from London saw me there and said: “Oh, I want you to do an exhibition with me.” And then I made an exhibition, where Hans Ulrich-Obrist, a grandfather for a turnip, accidentally went, saw my performance and said: “Come on, take part in the Marina Abramovich Presents exhibition at the Manchester International Festival.” I'm like, "What?!" And they have some artist jumped off two months before the start. My eyes shot out of their sockets when I found out where and what I had to do. It was all a bit like a dream. That's how it all started. Since I am a swindler by nature, I quickly adapted to all this.




"Performance carousel", performance "Empty buckets". Buenos Aires, 2014.

© David Prutting / Billy Farrell Agency

- How do you define the difference between performance and theater?

This is a very difficult question, and I don't know the answer to it. What we are doing now in "Practice" is just an attempt to answer this question. Alina Nasibullina, an actress at the Brusnikin Workshop, graduated from the Pyrfyr performance school at the Na Solyanka Gallery. You could say she is my student. Sounds wild. Yes, she is such a rebellious being, in a good way. She does not fully understand whether she is an artist or an actress. All the time he invents fictional characters for himself, being in a wonderful state of throwing. Uncertainty and mistakes, in my opinion, are the two main points of support for an artist. Another thing is that everyone is scared. Because no one knows what it is. But people who confuse these two concepts - theater and performance - they are mistaken. These are very different things though. The actor goes home after the performance, he has a wife, children, a refrigerator, a TV set and all that. And the performer does not go anywhere, his work is a part of his life and its truth is inside out. The process in performance does not end at all. It's all so serious, bloody, if you really do it, that you have no chance to pretend that it's over and "can I go home." Just recently, when, after the Foundling, in handcuffs, wrapped in a white sheet, I stood like an antique statue, and five police cars around, and with them three more teams of firefighters, I had a feeling that now I would wake up, and all this will end. But for some reason they took me to a solitary cell, they chained me to a pipe, interrogated ten different people, then they took me to prison and let me into a cell where I was the only white man. And then the endless hip-hop battle began. On the one hand, I was wildly happy, because something was happening to which I no longer have anything to do, I am only a conductor for this story. It’s always like this with Foundling - I have a complete feeling that I didn’t invent anything and my task is just to let everything happen. After all, I lie in my box and lie, and the audience, the public - that's who makes the work of art - they decide everything for me. It's like when a cat pukes. She looks at you with huge eyes and asks for your help. Because she is terribly scared and she does not understand what is happening to her. She coughs, something erupts from her, you stand nearby and do not help.

I couldn't help doing the Foundling - I had to send these messages to the world.
The difference between an actor and a performance artist is also this: once you have accepted this mission, that's it. Well, like Pyotr Pavlensky. In fact, he atones for the sins of other people, accepting martyrdom. But not all performers suffer! Many simply perform complex manipulations or produce complex meanings. On the whole, performance is the closest form of art to religion. First of all, this is serious. Secondly, it is obedience, vows, strictness and order, suffering in the name of the higher. Thirdly, this is interaction with some concepts and phenomena that you yourself are not able to realize, but you must go for it. And the theater can also be close to religion. As in the case of Jerzy Grotowski or Anatoly Vasiliev.

- Can we say that the ideal actor for you is a performance artist?


No, there's no way to say that. The ideal actor is completely subordinate to the will of the director. The performer is never subject to anyone's will. In my case, the actor is generally a puppet. What am I doing? I take and show voices, gestures, I demonstrate and explain everything myself, I generally have a completely idiotic way of rehearsing. Apparently, because he never studied it anywhere. Then the actor repeats it, then masters it, everything mastered sticks to him. And then I cut off the conditional ropes on which the actor is suspended, like a puppet, and what remains is his own development of the role.




"Old Women" at the "Golden Mask" festival. Moscow, 2009.

© Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich

- Do you follow what is happening in the contemporary cultural context in Russia? About creation "Russian Art Union" The Russian Art Union is a new ambitious association, which includes writer Zakhar Prilepin, producer Eduard Boyakov, musician Alexander F. Sklyar and others. The manifesto openly supports the president's policy and proclaims the need to strengthen and develop everything patriotic and Orthodox in the territory of modern culture and art. what do you think?

There is absolutely no time to keep track of all this. What difference does it make what people say and write, who in three years will change anyway and will write and say some other, polar other words. Why remember what is happening now? This is just a tough time. At that moment, when they will again say some pleasant and understandable things, we will again, probably, get closer to them. It's all waves, I think.

- In the theater, you almost always work with texts by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Were any of them written at your request?

- Yes, sure. "Tango Square" is a text that she wrote at my request. I then brought this text to Galina Borisovna Volchek, the idea was to stage it with Leah Akhedzhakova. Leah did not dare to play the text, it seemed too radical to her, and nothing happened with Sovremennik, but as a result I put this text in the TsIM with my regular actresses. She wrote several different things at my request. We are, of course, very close. We fight a lot and it's not easy for us. We are not lucky that we have a family connection (Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is the mother of Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich. - Note. ed.). For me, there are two ideal authors that I hear and understand. Petrushevskaya and Kharms. I am very lucky that I am not a relative of Kharms.

- About "Yelena" it is known that this is a performance based on the story of Petrushevskaya "The New Adventures of Elena the Beautiful" and that in the only role is the actress of "Dmitry Brusnikin's Workshop" Alina Nasibullina. All other information is updated almost daily. What do you have going on in rehearsals?


At rehearsals, we talk with Alina about who she is after all here: an actress or a performance artist. After much thought, we realized that here she is still a theater actress and that at least in this we will be conventional. Having abandoned the idea of ​​two performances, Alina and I breathed freely - each for our own reason - and now we understand that "Yelena" (emphasis on the first syllable) is still a theater, even if it is with a hanger and all that. It's just a post-dramatism of some other kind, the value of which we ourselves have yet to evaluate.

- Have you thought about a big theatrical form?

I thought about it a lot, but, unfortunately, the hour has not yet come when a queue of directors of opera theaters with different proposals will line up for me. Yes, I really want to do opera. Because this is a format where there are restrictions at every step, and I like that. And also opera singers are often very bad actors, which is also good, they can be turned off and asked to be a function. And then there is the orchestra, which cannot be put anywhere and which makes the singers very far from the audience. So I'm very interested. And I also think about the big dramatic scene. It seems to me that I am completely ready for it internally. And the fact that I always do something small for 50 or a maximum of 250 people is connected with my reputation as a chamber avant-garde artist. But I am very humble about this and, most likely, I evaluate myself sensibly. Although it would be much easier for me to work with 50 actors than with one. Energetically there you can come out much more sharply, dumbfound. It is very difficult to stun with one actor. But when there are a lot of them, it is immediately easy to throw thunder and lightning.

- Now you have a premiere in "Practice". And then what?


In addition to what I have already mentioned, I am starting to do a project called "Superbelisks". I hang myself from a construction crane over the tallest obelisks in the world, standing with my feet on the top of the obelisk, and hang in this way for seven hours over each. I have a terrible fear of heights, so this includes working with my phobias and limits. I just hung 7 hours 40 meters above the MAC building in São Paulo, where my exhibition was opening, to draw attention to the topic of racism, which is so burning in Brazil. It was scary in the first two hours, then it was cool. And about the obelisks - here the story is like in a joke. A man comes to the doctor, and he has a toad on his head. The doctor says: “What are you complaining about?” And suddenly the toad answers: “Yes, something stuck to the ass.” So the question occupies me: what comes first - the obelisk or the human body that perched on it and froze? This is in short.

- Do you have a dream project? An obsession that is impossible to implement?


Certainly! I rise into the air several times a week in my sleep, I have a certain device built in the region of the seventh cervical vertebra that helps me soar, I control the speed and scale. The dimensions of my body vary - I can be the size of a fist or a huge building. I have been dreaming about this so intrusively for a couple of years now that I think: everything is not in vain and soon something may change. But in what direction and how, it is not for me to guess.

Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich

“It's time to say it in full - from this Monday I am no longer the director of the State Gallery on Solyanka.

Actually, I never intended to be. It did not seem to me at all, even in those still relatively prosperous times, that an artist should work for the state. At that moment, I was just busy with an exciting business: I was packing my bags to really move to my beloved country with the letter Br. But when my father, Boris Pavlov, accidentally died - and this happened in the fall of 2009 - then Romuald Krylov, then the head of the Department of Culture of the Central District of Moscow, who started a lot of interesting things in the Moscow center - for example, who became the godfather of the Olya Sviblova Museum - called and said: Well, Fedya, if it's not you, then I can't vouch for anything. It was important for me that my father's business continued. And I realized that yes. So our new Solyanka appeared.

It has always been interesting. Still, I said from the very beginning that I would make an artist-run space - a space under the control of an artist - a story in which I would not have to lie to myself or do projects that are completely alien to my nature. Another question is that finding money for something that was close to my nature turned out to be a practically unrealizable task. And so, having complicated my fate to the limit, but at the same time protecting myself from endless photo exhibitions of the children of deputies, paintings by the mistresses of the oligarchs and expositions of the parish drawing “Our district through the eyes of the flock”, I began to think in horror what to do. However, everything somehow happened right. Later, Shulgin's Electromuseum and a couple of other good museum projects invented by artists appeared, but, as far as I understand, Solyanka was the first to work in this direction.

Already in 2011, Solyanka became what it remains to this day - with Marina Abramovich as a patroness, with Norstein in the form of a locally revered saint, and with Sigalit Landau in the form of Demeter, who came down to us to celebrate the harvest of pickled fruits from the Dead Sea. Pyrfyr was born - both as a school and as an Endless Performance Festival, and the retrospectives of Tarkovsky, Parajanov and Bill Plimpton and a good 50 exhibitions, about which we are still not a bit ashamed, became the foundation of Solyanka, already quite an institution - with its own public and meaning - and we were very proud of it. A series of exhibitions of Russian performance "Seven Courageous" has become a separate source of pride: when we did the first in 2011, the Russian performance stage was empty, Kulik was no longer in performance, and no one appeared, so Liza Morozova and Lena Kovylina and I and had to more or less exist alone. I had to persuade friends from neighboring media to come and become performance artists for a while. So, for example, there was an excellent debut in live art with Gali Solodovnikova, but when they collected the last one, “The Artist in the Paddock”, about exposure in performance, there was already plenty to choose from - the Russian scene revived.



Yolanda Jansen. Performance within the framework of the exhibition "Hitting a nerve", May 2017

Image courtesy of Solyanka VPA press office

Pyrfyr is a heroic project. Collecting at least some money from people who want to become performance artists is a furious task. Everyone understands that it is impossible to make money with this. But we tried as hard as we could and turned out, probably, five or six streams of students. Of these, seven people are constantly engaged in performance, and many return to this heat from time to time.

Seeing people who were previously dentists, programmers or fashion designers and suddenly opened a completely unexpected door inside themselves and entered it without looking back is a real thrill. I follow, of course. And I try to call them when I supervise group projects related to performance and recommend them to other people. But in general, such a school should live on grants, and not try to pay for itself. Grants should be handled by a team of professionals. But the problem is that my work as the director of Solyanka was entirely on the run around the world's environs with an outstretched hand. Stretching out your other hand to ask for more for the school was completely impossible. So school is over for now. But I believe that her hour will come. The experience gained is excellent, Liza Morozova and other associates are well aware of who is worth something as a teacher, so one day we will return to this. There is a reason for this - after all, marvelous flowers bloomed in this garden.

Solyanka was the first Russian institution to decide to work every day until 10 pm, and on Fridays until midnight. And she remains the only one. Then a similar schedule was made by the Garage, and even later by the Jewish Museum, well, the rest slowly and rustily began to turn to face the visitor. In some London or Paris, after all, everything is still terrible in this sense. Everything closes at six. I just wonder why they don't do theaters at three o'clock in the afternoon on weekdays? It's pretty much the same idea. Complete idiocy, to be honest. The night director and the night curator are also our history, which is now practiced by many in one form or another. But it is unlikely that any of the other directors will begin to regularly dress up as the caretaker Lyudmila Nikolaevna and meet visitors at the reception (Alas, the real Lyudmila Nikolaevna died last year). But I don't insist. Some things should remain only on Solyanka.



Image courtesy of Solyanka VPA press office

In fact, I've been thinking about leaving for a couple of years now. But here at once many reasons shot. In 2019 I have two big projects in New York, a museum exhibition in London and several group stories around the world, not to mention two new performances, one in Moscow and one in London. I just physically would not have survived Solyanka. And I’m not acting quite honestly, accepting the rules of the game of the state - I don’t know what my next performance work will be and whether my state bosses will have to explain to their bosses why they need such a strange person in a position in a controlled department. Yes, and taxpayers - do they need this? No, I don't even want to think about it. Fortunately, there are private money and spaces whose owners do not need to be convinced - they themselves want to work. The only pity is that it will not be in Russia.

This old video cassette needs to be rewound a few years ago. Then Vladimir Filippov appeared in the Department of Culture of Moscow, a man who brought the right meaning and calm confidence - it is he who should be thanked for the last years of Solyanka and many other things in Moscow culture - he miraculously managed to hear and be heard. In November, he left for another job. But even earlier, in September of this year, Rita Osepyan and I, the chief curator of Solyanka and, in general, the curator with whom we most invented and talked about the state of performance (not only in Moscow, but also, for example, in Sao Paulo) in recent years - and so, we did not manage to open one important exhibition, just invented by Katya Nenasheva. There were reasons for that, I still don’t want to talk about them, but it became clear: my time on Solyanka was thinner, burst, it’s time. Then I started thinking about how best to do it. And he began to persuade the only person in the world, capable of leading Solyanka further, to get down to business. Katya Bochavar, probably my main accomplice and the person by whom I have been checking watches in my work for more than ten years, agreed to move to Solyanka from the north of Moscow (as she once agreed to move to Moscow from New York), continuing what we did and what she herself did in the last four years on the Ground.

I am very happy with how everything was resolved - people who fell in love with Solyanka and did not miss exhibitions there will definitely be very interested. And I will not go anywhere and will help - a little more from afar than before, heading the Board of Trustees of Solyanka and continuing to return from time to time with individual projects, including some of those that have already become a tradition on Solyanka.