On March 7, 2026 the Lemon Acid Factory will host the opening of the group exhibition “FOREVER “curated by Peter Belyi. For this project Alexandra Gart, an artist represented by Anna Nova Gallery, has created a large-scale work.
“The artists participating in the project do not form a unified group or movement. What connects them is their affiliation with the Saint Petersburg subcultural scene. This diversity of practices is set against the industrial eclecticism of a space that was never intended for art. Holes, passages, staircases, tiles, crumbling walls — the remnants of the Lemon Acid Factory — become the ground from which contemporary art emerges. The exhibition can be read as a portrait of a generation (or generations) living under new conditions, experiencing an endlessly stretched present, a reboot of timelessness. The curatorial concept of “FOREVER” is built on the idea that each artist expresses the state of the present moment through a single chosen word: escapism, retrospection, melancholy, dystopia, transition, eros, chaos, rage, resistance, despair, silence.
Eleven words, eleven artists — together forming what in the language of the 1970 could be called the “Group of Eleven.” In part the exhibition returns to the traditions of the Gazanevsky culture when nonconformist artists formed collectives to articulate a shared unconscious and voice their hopes, fears and anxieties — everything that art is usually concerned with. Disorientation in the present a sense of substitution and underexposure of images, simulacra in twilight, an abandoned factory, a swamp, the metaphysics of late-Soviet exhibition spaces overlaid with a virtual dystopia — a total state of uncertainty and irreversible emptiness. The artists speak in a language without definition: pataphysics overcoming style and form, rocking the invisible boat of art (navicula artis) as it moves into a vortex of imagined catastrophe — whether generated or real. The last remaining support becomes the rusted Soviet handrails of unstable staircases. The apocalypse is revealed not through horsemen or smoke, but through emptiness filled with invisible digital content, without form, beginning or end. This is FOREVER”, — Peter Belyi.
Participating artists also include: Leonid Tche, Igor Tishin, Katerina Veselovskaya, Igor Yanovsky, Alexander Tsikarishvili, Ivan Chemakin, Elena Filaretova, Kolya Sadovnik, Vadim Mikhailov and Tatyana Podmarkova.
Opening: March 7 from 6:00 p.m. Admission by guest list and tickets.
The exhibition will be open until April 10, 2026!
