Contemporary art festival kicks off in Rostov-on-Don

Artists from around the world will gather in Rostov-on-Don today for a two-week festival that will examine how contemporary art impacts and transforms urban environments. According to the 16th Line gallery website, one of the venues for the festival, the aim of Cooperation Territory is to look at how artists “use the language of art as a tool to change reality”.

The festival’s main exhibition is 36 Hours, a repeat of a show curated by Walter Hopps at the Museum of Temporary Art in Washington 35 years ago, which allowed visitors to bring and exhibit anything they considered to be art. Elsewhere the festival’s curators, Leyly Aslanova and Maria Sigutina, will be asking spectators to reflect on what unites us and the role of urban spaces in creating relationships between the past, present and future.

The festival in Rostov-on-Don, a city in south-west Russia, will bring together artists from Australia, the UK, Japan, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Germany and Russia. The Cooperation Territory Festival will run from 1 to 14 August at a number of the city’s galleries, including the Makaronka Art Centre, the 16th Line Gallery and and CreativeSpace.PRO.