Dates: 12/07/2025 - 31/08/2025
Address: 9 Usacheva St., Moscow
Russian horror is a unique phenomenon, weaving together folk myths, Soviet legacy, bleak urbanity, and metaphysical dread. Unlike its Western counterpart, the Russian tradition leans toward melancholy, absurdity, irony, and existential fear. This aesthetic permeates contemporary art, from painting and installations to film, literature, and digital media.
"Russian Horror: Ritual of Contradictions" is an inverted mirror of reality, revealing more than is visible in a reflection. It is a meditation on the superstitions of a consciousness that lifts fears from the collective unconscious—from the spirits of a forest to the ghosts of Soviet archives. Here, horror appears not as a genre, but as a mode of entry into the analysis and diagnosis of our very palette of thought.
Russian culture, always balancing on the edge of the real and the fantastical, the rational and the mystical, produces horror as a mirror of contradictions, filled with the reflection of our fears. A multi-directional and erratic force speculates with these fears from birth to old age, shifting its pressure onto the fragile points of everyday life. "A fairy tale is a lie, yet a hint is in it"—within this not-always-kind tale lies our mental irony, not always logical, yet captivating in its quiet ritualism of being.
This project invites you to travel a road into the thicket of fairy-tale contradictions found in the worlds of diverse contemporary artists, encountering branching paths that lead into the paradoxical nature of the Russian imagination.
"Russian Horror: Ritual of Contradictions" is an inverted mirror of reality, revealing more than is visible in a reflection. It is a meditation on the superstitions of a consciousness that lifts fears from the collective unconscious—from the spirits of a forest to the ghosts of Soviet archives. Here, horror appears not as a genre, but as a mode of entry into the analysis and diagnosis of our very palette of thought.
Russian culture, always balancing on the edge of the real and the fantastical, the rational and the mystical, produces horror as a mirror of contradictions, filled with the reflection of our fears. A multi-directional and erratic force speculates with these fears from birth to old age, shifting its pressure onto the fragile points of everyday life. "A fairy tale is a lie, yet a hint is in it"—within this not-always-kind tale lies our mental irony, not always logical, yet captivating in its quiet ritualism of being.
This project invites you to travel a road into the thicket of fairy-tale contradictions found in the worlds of diverse contemporary artists, encountering branching paths that lead into the paradoxical nature of the Russian imagination.
Featured artists: Natalia Spechinskaya, Tengiz Shamov, Maria Safronova, Anton Kuznetsov, Alina Glazun, Yan Posadsky, Daria Arbuzova, Evgenia Voinar, Igor Sharko, Andrey Shkarin and Maria Efimova, Anastasia Nesterenko, Alexander Lemish, Anastasia Ivanenkova, Ekaterina Pashkevich, Artem and Anton Matveyevy, Nikolai Prokofiev, Irina Drozd.
Curator: Sergey Dorokhov
Curator: Sergey Dorokhov