The interview of our ward by talented artist

My name is Alexei Rumyantsev.

I work as a designer of church furniture for Orthodox churches. In addition, I am professionally engaged in contemporary art. Mostly I work with installations, assemblies, periodically I return to the graphic art and sculpture.

I prefer the man-made production of my works, in which the handicraft component is a form of supplementing and rethinking the conceptual discourse in postdigital art.


My education as a professional artist was greatly promoted by the Open Culture Foundation, thanks to which in 2014 I received a grant for free two-year training at the Institute of Problems of Contemporary Art, one of the oldest schools of contemporary art.

I specially came to go to school, because the systematized knowledge of contemporary art was sorely lacking and it prevented full implementation of my own artistic projects. The school allowed to fill these gaps, except for this I got acquainted with the artistic environment, I got new friends and acquaintances from this environment. Thanks to this, new ideas, projects and methods of its implementation appeared, since before that I was mainly engaged in graphics.

But I must say that this was contributed, in the first place, by the Open Culture Foundation itself, as it selected grant applicants from newcomers from other cities. At the meeting, the head of the foundation Nataliya Resh asked to conduct a creative diary throughout the entire period of training, record your impressions as a new, unknown place, and fix your ideas and images.
This creative diary, in fact, determined my interests, materials, artistic language for the next four years, helped to implement two full-fledged personal projects "Reconstruction 4.0" in 2016 and "Big Data" in 2017 in CTI "Fabrika". Therefore, I am very grateful to the foundation, the curators and the founder of the OCF Natalia Resh, for their sincere interest and participation in my creative development!

Such initiatives, when, in fact, there is a full-fledged individual curatorial work on developing creative potential - it is unique, very valuable and very demanded, especially since in schools such an individual approach is rarely practiced (at least that was two years ago).


If we talk about artists who influenced me, I would single out the classics from Anselm Kiefer with his picturesque assemblies and installations, Kurt Schwitters and Robert Mallary, representatives of Dadaism and Neo-Dadaism. From the modern African and Asian artists such as El Anatsui, Ibrahim Mahama, Tiharu Siota, etc. But most of all I am inspired by photographs of the microcosm or the world of people shot from a drones or a satellite with their topology, patterns and fractals.

The main theme of my work, in one way or another, is the interaction of modern man with his archaically adaptive patterns of behavior, formed before the Paleolithic, and the information environment, new technologies such as Big Data, neural networks, genetic engineering, etc. And on the basis of this interaction - the prospects for the formation of a new ethics and new social norms of the information society in conditions of post-capitalism. The topic is very relevant, so it is quite common. However, in my works I mostly use man-made images, familiar, "archaic" materials, which I modify and correct, which, in my opinion, is more accurately reflected by our friend, the "old" world, which is modernized under the influence of new technologies.

For the last six months, I have participated very little and exhibited, as I have embodied all the ideas I have learned during my studies and in my creative diary in my personal projects and numerous group exhibitions. So, now I'm looking for inspiration, I'm gaining material for new projects. I think maybe it's worth changing the place of location, living in some foreign art residence and again starting a creative diary!


Therefore, if the Open Culture Foundation continued to support artists even after graduation, it would be very cool, although I understand that it is very difficult in modern realities!