The pop/off/art 2.0 gallery presents a group exhibition, “Carefully Biting on the Corner of a Tea-Time Biscuit.” Its title refers to Marcel Proust’s canonical text, “Towards Swann” (1913), namely to the moment when the protagonist dips a madeleine into a cup of tea and then bites into it, plunging into the vague experience of another, bygone time.

The concept of the project was born from a collision with the history of the space itself, which the gallery occupied in its second iteration. Previously, for a long time, the exhibition space served as a street crossing — an ordinary “arch” between the street and the courtyard. Over time, it acquired new additional walls at the ends, limiting the space — and already an indoor character. And not so long ago, a bookstore that had been operating here for a long time, functioning as an official representative of the cult periodical on art "Art Magazine", turned into one of the locations of a famous Moscow gallery. This theme of the transformation of a place to which the movement of memory unconsciously turns and in which it is difficult to recognize the outlines of a former life, became the starting point for the project.

The key figures of the project are mainly Soviet artists who resort to a similar sensory spectrum that the text of the French classic has. Here we see flirting with the rough magic of the everyday world, as in Mikhail Roginsky or Arkady Petrov, and the delicate sophistication of material texture, as in Andrei Grositsky or Alexander Ney, and, of course, the aestheticization of the ruin itself and the theme of the transformative passage of time — subjects that were fashionable in the 1900s and 1910s, and which have not lost their relevance in the hundred years since.

Everyday life, snatched from different eras and described in different languages, is surrounded by an aura of continuous loss, change, and transformation. Over time, the ruin acquires new meanings, a poorly lit passage turns into a well-finished office that works to display works of art. Romanticization of the elusive past is a commonplace subject that has long since become commonplace, and the legacy of modernism is, without a doubt, that very comfortable chair that gives you the opportunity to take a break. Perhaps someone will offer you coffee and cakes with it.

Participants: Anna Afonina, Igor Vulokh, Andrey Grositsky, Yuri Zlotnikov, Zenon Komissarenko, Oleg Lang, Rostislav Lebedev, Boris Markovnikov, Alexander Ney, Alexander Pankin, Arkady Petrov, Alexander Plyusnin, Mikhail Roginsky, Daria Surovtseva, Elena Surovtseva, Shamil Shaaev.

Curator: Maria Doronina

Maria Doronina (b. 1987) is a curator, art critic, and employee of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA). She graduated from the Department of Art History and Theory, Faculty of History, Lomonosov Moscow State University (2009), and the Institute of Contemporary Art (2010). Author of publications in the publications Dialogue of Arts, Colta, aroundart, and the Art magazine.