“Actual Russia” is a multidisciplinary educational project aimed at attracting the attention of the general public to contemporary Russian art, which solves the tasks of artistic reflection, preservation and transmission of cultural memory. On March 5, 2020, the Union of Artists of Russia and the Foundation for the Development of Contemporary Art will open an annual exhibition in the Exhibition Hall of the Zaryadye Park Media Center. This year's theme is memory.

Memory is one of the main criteria by which we distinguish between living and nonliving. Culture from generation to generation does not transmit anything but memory, clinging to material objects. Memory is selective, and its content directly determines the structure of the personality, and in relation to cultural memory, the structure of our society.

The universal medium for the transfer of cultural experience is art.
In the modern exhibition hall, art plays the same role as in the Lascaux cave and Babylonian temples — always the actual language of memory, the code system of captured images. As the only sure remedy for amnesia, contemporary art translates and re-actualizes historical experience.

The work of fifty artists from all over Russia, representatives of various art schools and schools, the project “Actual Russia: the art of memory” includes a single immersive medium: Valera and Natasha Cherkashina, Roman Kazus, Julia Malinina, Igor and Ekaterina Pestovs, Natalya Gudovich, Vadim Soloviev and other

The exhibition presents contemporary art as a method, or a set of principles, contributing to the organization of collective memory units in hypertext in a universal language. Recognition of artistic images is not too different from real ones. And reality itself comes from a good story about it.

The exhibition will run from March 6 to April 15, 2020. Entrance to it and other events within the project is free.

The project “Actual Russia: the art of memory” is implemented using a grant from the President of the Russian Federation provided by the Presidential Grants Fund.