Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing

Russia looms large in our global consciousness, but most of its presence is felt politically instead of artistically. While Moscow is the largest city in Europe, its contemporary and modern art has been largely passed over. Editors Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have set out to change this with Cosmic Shift, the first anthology of Russian art writing to be published outside of Russia. The country’s most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators, and historians come together to examine the region’s various movements of contemporary art, culture, and theory. With contributions from Barte de Baere, Boris Groys, Anton Vidokle, Bogdan Mamonov, Pavel Pepperstein, Dimitri Prigov, and Maria Sumnina, among many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vast and complex nation built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal and a culture battling its own histories and ideologies.