On January 29, 2024, in Mogilev, Belarus, at the Dubrava Centre, the art exhibition "Nature’s Canvas: Contemporary Perspectives" opened. This exhibition was organized by art director and art curator Karina Mukhametkulova. The exhibition featured works (photography, digital art, video art, and painting) by 10 outstanding international artists: Aleksandr Basovich Tarelkin, Aleksei Vasilchenko, Alin Russ, Anna Fedotova, Kungurova Natalia, Maria Zhidkova, Maxim Badikov, Mika Stetsovski, Oleg Dokin, and Tatiana Ospennikova.

The main theme of the exhibition is the exploration of the concept of nature through various mediums and an attempt to answer the following questions: What is nature from the perspective of a contemporary artist? What is nature in the era of wars, disasters, economic crises, and epidemics? Where is the boundary between nature and non-nature, between nature and humans? Thanks to the curator’s cohesive work and the artists' team, the exhibition represents a cohesive statement about nature as an object X (the absolute unknowable). Nature in these works is revealed as something infinitely elusive and always present (that which one can never truly escape from). Each artist presents their own unique (marginal?) concept of nature through their works. According to Natalia Kungurova, nature is something that cannot be conveyed to another; it is the mark of an unknowable experience; it is the forced silence of cave paintings spanning millennia of human history. Maxim Badikov explores the notion of nature through the dialectical anti-symbiosis of the living and the dead, the dark and the light. Mika Stetsovski comprehends nature through the concepts of the explored and the unexplored; the artist seemingly tests the relationship between nature and humans and endows each of these pairs with the ability to inhabit their binary counterpart. Tatiana Ospennikova reinvents the concept of nature through post-dramatic deconstruction and the use of artistic intervention by placing objects in unprecedented habitats. The artist goes beyond viewing nature as a territory of drama and tragedy, thereby seemingly challenging our colonial anthropocentric view of nature as the resource base of humanity. Oleg Dokin considers nature as a collection of self-dissolving objects. Aleksandr Basovich Tarelkin reflects on nature by surpassing traditional laws of physics and exploring the potential of the non-human impossible through the lens of human presence. This exhibition is a breathtaking cascade of artistic professionalism and thought-provoking discourse on ecology and the future of humanity.

Official website of the "Nature’s Canvas: Contemporary Perspectives" art exhibition

Author: Jenya Stashkov, artist and art critic, Sheffield, UK