Admission is by ticket, available for purchase at the Gallery
Full-price ticket — 250 rubles
Discounted ticket — 150 rubles
Anna Nova Gallery presents In Imaginary Country, a solo exhibition by Dima Filippov. The exhibition brings together new photographic works and light objects, a graphic series, and video art. It will be on view from 9 October to 15 November 2026.
The project’s central visual motif is the experience of splitting sunlight through optical instruments. By manipulating his gaze, doubling and tripling images, and superimposing horizon lines, the artist makes visible an “imaginary” country that exists alongside the legally recognised, delineated territory. The dissolution of boundaries and control, danger and the sense of home converge in lines of light captured through handmade, disposable lenses.
The exhibition’s concept unfolds as visitors move through the space. One of Filippov’s photographs, taken in 2009, serves as the starting point for a series of new photographic objects created as he developed the idea for the 2026 exhibition. “I was haunted by photographs taken with old Soviet cameras in places where I had never been before, on the outskirts of the city. Scattered remnants of rubbish, weeds, field roads, and low hills, along with the faint ruins of buildings, laid the foundations for an idea of coming into contact with the experience of life as it is: spread out, protecting its own peace in this land. The impression was powerful, and it has remained so,” Dima recalls. Wooden grid structures also appear on the walls of the ground-floor galleries, between the stripes, rows of repeated graphic images of dots — “suns” — are arranged.
The second floor inverts the composition of the first, moving the grid from the walls onto the floor. The rows of “suns” are brought together in a series of objects made from thin brass tubes. Filippov also uses this material to create his disposable pinhole lenses. The floor’s central work is a video piece composed of fragments — “experiments” in bringing the imaginary country into view. These fragments reveal an original performative practice, a way of reconstructing one’s perception of the surrounding space.
“Every time I photograph the grass beneath my feet, I realise that it is more convincing than anything else I have ever seen. When I raise my head, I see the one sun shining on that grass. I imagined what it would be like if there were many suns, and how I would feel. What if there were many versions of me, able to exist side by side, walking one after another in a procession, thinking ten or a hundred times more deeply about it all? Would that bring me closer to understanding this place?” says Dima Filippov.
