«Avangrad»: volgograd perestroika and post-soviet performance (1986-2005)

The article aims to reconstruct systematically the history of the Volgograd performance, trace the lineage and interferences, the role of the major art-festivals in the emergence of new generations of artists, as well as to disclose variability of procedural art-practices in Volgograd from 1986 to 2005. Summing up the performance review of the Volgograd two decades (mid-1980s to mid-2000s), the author notes that it was not a coher- ent movement or systematic process, and was not institutionalized due to the lack of a system of commercial galleries, inspiring artistic process in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A gradual attenuation of the Square as a social and cultural education and place of attraction for artists, localized in the heart of the city, caused a gradual centrifugal movement towards the outlying, uninhabited, abandoned spaces and places of pilgrimage (the graveyard of ships, Krasnoslobodskaya kosa, Moratnike), which was associated with their romanticize, aestheticization, by a certain opacity. However, throughout the period under review we can identify several General trends: the desire of artists to theatrical, carnival, spectacularity, as well as spontaneous and impro- vised action.