Opening

48 Hours Novosibirsk

Exhibition opening of “48 Hours Novosibirsk”

Greeting and introduction:
Karin Korte, Councilor for Culture
Per Brandt, curator
Pjotr Zherebtsov, curator

The exhibition ‘48 Hours Novosibirsk’ at the Galerie im Saalbau shows works by five art-ists/artist collectives from Siberia. It is a guest contribution from the festival of the same name, a Goethe-Institut project funded by the German Foreign Office and a series of part-ners from Novosibirsk in partnership with the festival ‘48 Hours Neukölln’. After the artists from Neukölln took part in the Novosibirsk festival, the ‘return match’ is now taking place.

‘48 Hours Novosibirsk’ (48hNSK) is a decentralised and participative festival for contempo-rary artists which has taken place twice already with latterly more than three hundred artists at more than forty locations in Russia’s third largest city. The project offers the local Novosi-birsk scene a platform and networking opportunities with stakeholders in Germany, to coun-ter the marginalisation of contemporary art that is often vilified as being degenerate. Concep-tually, the Siberian festival is a location-specific adaptation of the Berlin festival ‘48 Hours Neukölln’, which has been following a ‘bottom-up’ strategy routed in the independent scene for more than twenty years. Approaches of this kind are particularly relevant in Russia where artistic freedom has been curtailed for many years, particularly at the major institutions, and now hardly exists. Independently organised initiatives are the last precarious bastions for criti-cal discourse and practices.