Emergency Communication: the art project transforming a Moscow apartment block

Emergency Communication describes itself as a tangle of interactions. Moscow’s latest contemporary art project has shunned formal exhibition spaces, instead finding room in the communal space on the ground floor of a city apartment block. The building — known locally as “The House on Legs” — is in itself an icon on modernist architecture.

For founder Darya Serenko, the project is the product of her own long-held dream to own an exhibition space. She has big plans for the space, including a lecture programme, workshops and festivals. But she stresses that the project will only stay open for as long as residents want to host it.

“We don’t call ourselves a gallery — we think of ourselves as an exhibition in running the length of the building,” she says. “The art space isn’t coming into the building as a foreign object: the house itself is expanding and transforming into a public space.”

Roughly half of the activists and curators taking part of the project live in the building itself: provoking what organisers hope will be a continuous discussion between neighbours, artists and tenants. The first exhibition is also close to home: celebrating the 50th anniversary of the building as a local architectural landmark.

To read more about the project (in Russian), click here.