On surfaces and spaces. Irina Ivannikova-Davydova, Vasily Kononov-Gredin

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the Vaults Centre for Artistic Production (GES-2 House of Culture) present On Surfaces and Spaces, a joint exhibition featuring young artists Irina Ivannikova-Davydova and Vasily Kononov-Gredin. Through distinct artistic approaches, they explore how domestic and urban spaces function not merely as backdrops for everyday life, but as reflections of taste, memory and human relationships.

Ivannikova-Davydova examines interiors as mirrors of desire and collective ideas of beauty, while Kononov-Gredin investigates the layered urban environment as a living organism where traces of time and advertising overlap to create a dynamic visual fabric. Together, they offer a holistic perspective on our perception of space, from the intimacy of a living-room sofa to a construction fence outside.

Irina Ivannikova-Davydova has spent several years developing her Packaging project, which focuses on the interiors of standardized apartments. Transforming everyday objects into works of art, she intertwines the personal and the public. While working at a real-estate agency, the artist has compiled an extensive archive of interiors that shows patterns of taste and codes of beauty in the mass unconscious.

Vasily Kononov-Gredin's presents a new work continuing his series Structures, in which he observes city streets for repetitive patterns and their unexpected interruptions. Vasily captures urban rhythms through photography: he takes pictures with a smartphone, processes the image digitally, displays it on the screen and re-photographs it on film before final manual printing. This multi-step process lends his urban scenes a special texture that exists between a document and a digital simulation, drawing attention to architecture, signage and fences, places where idealized city meets reality.

In the exhibition, both artists leave it to the audience to decide whether objects, surfaces and spaces are silent witnesses to life or active agents that shape reality. Here, the home and the city are not just places we inhabit, but also texts written by time, dreams and traces of human experience.

Curator

Victoria Vasilyeva

Irina Ivannikova-Davydova (b. 1986, Moscow) is an interdisciplinary artist working with digital art, performance, and performative photography. She is a co-author of the Social Practice project. Irina lectures for the programme Event Design. Theatre. Performance Art at the HSE School of Design. A finalist of GES-2 Collab 2024, she is a graduate of the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Laboratory of Media Performance at MMOMA, the Laboratory of Media Poetry, the PYRFYR School of Performance, the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. Her works have been exhibited in Russia and internationally.

Vasily Kononov-Gredin (b. 1990, Urzhum, Kirov region) is a contemporary artist working across sculpture, video, objects, paintings, and sound in large-scale formats and total installations. He graduated from the Vyatka Art College. His practice explores the boundaries of ritual, the passage of time, human variability and duality, the mind-body dualism. He engages with subjectivity, individual experience, deep memory, and the limits of autonomy within cultural, physical, and other conditions.

One of MMOMA’s key missions is to support and promote creative initiatives by a new generation of artists and curators, fostering their public presence and thereby enriching the landscape of Russian contemporary art. In line with this mission, MMOMA has launched a partnership with the Vaults Centre for Artistic Production, whose objectives closely align with its own. Within the Vaults, artists directly engage with their projects, experimenting across media and technologies. The MMOMA expert council selects artists and offers them the opportunity to exhibit their works at one of Moscow’s central venues. The Vaults Friends Club is an ongoing programme of the Vaults Centre, in which one of the main workshops is dedicated for a month to the realization of a selected artist’s project.