2025
Tula, Russia
Group show at the Octava exhibition space

The city is a strictly regulated space with a clearly structured infrastructure that shapes our daily – and often purely consumerist – behavioral patterns, leaving almost no room for creativity and creation. Passive interaction with the environment dulls our perception, rendering urban everyday life flat and faceless.

The project «City. Environment. Code» offers a new perspective on the urban environment through the lens of artistic interpretation. It presents a collective image of the Russian city as a space saturated with eclectic, seemingly fragmented meanings and images.

A special focus is placed on artists whose visual language has been shaped by street aesthetics. Most participants began with graffiti and street art – practices originally oriented towards dialogue with the city. For them, the street simultaneously becomes both a workshop and a gallery, where bold experiments coexist with refined style and thoughtful site-specific statements.

Within the exhibition, the city emerges in a poetic dimension, filled with layers of meanings, signs, and sounds. Artists from Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, and St. Petersburg portray it in diverse ways – as fragile and fading, emotional and rebellious.

Artists: Andrey Olenev (Nizhny Novgorod), Anna Martynenko (St. Petersburg), Anton Polsky (Make) in collaboration with Nikita Spiridonov (Berlin/Moscow), Vladimir Stekachyov (Moscow), Vladimir Chernyshev (Nizhny Novgorod), Volodimer (Moscow), Vsevolod Abazov (Nizhny Novgorod), Ivan Belov (Nizhny Novgorod), Mera N. (Nizhny Novgorod), Oleg Kuznetsov (Moscow), Partizaning (Moscow), Roman Dobro (St. Petersburg), Sergey Sapozhnikov (Rostov-on-Don/Moscow), SPACE (St. Petersburg).

Photographs by Olga Melekestceva.
In collaboration with Street art Archive, St. Petersburg.