Subject of 2022 is TRUST.

All of us are credulous by nature and do not doubt reciprocity. It is enough just to extend a hand and to hold arms out. It is like the air which we can breath with no limits and which will «never» end, but suddenly it turns out that the confidence can be «lost» or, conversely, can be «deserved», you can feel confidence or the lack of it; you can give «yours» or use «someone’s». Or you’d better not to use it and rely only upon yourself?

Where does it come from and where does it disappear? How limitless or how fragile is it? Perhaps, it is a «comfort zone» constantly changing as the atmospheric pressure where we can hardly stay for a long time and have «to step out» of it sometimes? So, is it confidence or compromise?

In any case, it is a process demanding reciprocity and time about which we do not know as much as we wish.

The focus of the Biennale is the artistic actualization of the phenomenon of confidence in the modern world under the circumstances which we can hardly call stable: coronavirus pandemic with unpredictable end, forthcoming economic crisis, crisis of relations between states, societies, communities and worldwide crisis of human and social relations.

We have suddenly found ourselves in a situation of enforced no-confidence as a state of growing uncertainty — when usual daily life is rapidly transforming — the future is not evident and the past is becoming indistinguishable, the event horizon has been postponed indefinitely and experiences a severe shortage of «tried and trusted» observers.

Anyhow, the Biennale traditionally based on its own «spirit of experiment» considers TRUST not only a subject but also an artistic challenge and an event method which is potentially ready to become a historical artistic statement.

In the presumably long-time situation of closed boundaries due to the pandemic and different international quarantines, it is obvious that «as always» in-person participation of international authors is impossible.

Nevertheless, the experiment of contemporary art is possible and necessary in the current circumstances where confidence will become the main action and the key to open «concealed doors» and break through different boundaries — from state to mental ones.

The keystone of the Shiryaevo Biennale 2022 will be an exhibition of showpieces as a result of joint implementation of artworks by international and Russian artists where, the first confide their «inmost soul» remotely and online and the second embody the idea in a «material form» and in a «proper place», on the one hand, assuming it as their contribution based on their own experience and artistic intuition and, on the other hand, adding something on their own behalf (by mutual agreement or without it) guided by personal principles and vision.

Consequently — TRUST — becomes a tool and basic material for creation of an artwork — where confident nature of realization process and the joint process itself and searching for proper intonation, scale, context and place for realization of works by Russian and international authors will allow to create, probably, a short-life but, however, highly valuable field of human, artistic, co-authored or confrontational relations which while taking shape will become the «exhibits» of the Biennale main project.

Based on the state of global uncertainty as the main constant of the year we consciously use contextuality, maximum flexibility and variability — new (temporary) rules for holding the 11th version of the Biennale: processualisation and sudden presentation, a part of the whole is more important than the whole, the whole is distinguishable when there is no identity…

Roman Korzhov
Biennale Commissar