The 4th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art has announced the 60 artists and associations that will participate in this year’s main project. The 2017 art project includes international artists as well as Russian artists, both established and young, from across the country, including the Ural region. “The curator has chosen a variety of names, from early cinema experimenters to contemporary generation of media artists, who research how technology influences today’s reality. He spent a considerable amount of time getting familiar with the Ural art scene, and among the chosen artists are those, for whom the biennial is their first experience of international exhibition,” says biennial commissioner Alisa Prudnikova.

The Portuguese curator João Ribas is in charge of the of the 4th biennial’s main project, and his work revolves around three guiding metaphors: image as witness, capitalism choreographies, and persistent word. This year artists will examine how the fourth industrial revolution of information and communication technologies has transformed the way we live, work, dream, and play. By employing the exhibition as a tool for visual, experiential, and discursive study, the biennial will be organized around modes of understanding the future of our network-driven conditions.

The Ural Industrial Biennial is the largest regional art projects with international participation operating on Russian soil. Held every two years in large unconventional exhibition spaces in Yekaterinburg and other cities in the Sverdlovsk region, this year’s biennial will be held in a former factory responsible for making instruments in Yekaterinburg.

Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art: New Literacy, Yekaterinburg. From September 14 to November 12.