Curator — Lizaveta Matveeva 

In November-December 2020, Lizaveta Matveeva held a series of workshops with the participants of the School of Young Artists of the PRO ARTE Foundation. The artists developed an idea of a site-specific installation in the exhibition space of the PRO ARTE Foundation at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. At the workshops, the artists discussed project ideas, refined and finalized them, studied how to design a project presentation, to develop and writ down a project concept and its technical description. 

As a result of these workshops, Lizaveta Matveeva and the PRO ARTE Foundation selected four art projects for further implementation as solo exhibitions. These projects were selected according to the criteria of elaboration and feasibility. Despite the fact that four projects were selected for implementation, Lizaveta Matveeva noticed that each of the proposed ideas was worthy of further implementation. 

The artists, reflecting and analyzing the local context, drew attention to diverse features of the place. Some of the artists worked with ambiguous and tragic history of the Peter and Paul Fortress, some — with its no less complex present, some addressed its form or content. 

The four selected projects unexpectedly formed into formal or semantic pairs, and we expect the viewer to be interested in finding parallels and intersections, common and different.