01/24: Yuri Avvakumov - MiSCeLLaNeouS

Yuri Avvakumov (born 1957) is an architect, artist and designer.

Since 1984 he has been a participant, curator and organizer of Paper Architecture exhibitions in Ljubljana, Paris, Milan, London, Frankfurt, Antwerp, Cologne, Brussels, Zurich, Cambridge, Austin, and Moscow. The concept of paper architecture, which Avvakumov himself introduced into the vocabulary of art criticism, has entered the history of architecture and also the history of modern Russian art, as a genre of conceptual design in the USSR of the 80's.

Between 1996 and 2000 Avvakumov's installation "Russian Utopia: a Depository" devoted to designs of Russian architecture which were never built has been displayed at the Venice Biennial, the Dutch Architectural Institute, Rotterdam, the State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, the Museum Exhibition Center, Volgograd, and the Russian State Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Selected works from his series Temporary Monuments have been exhibited at museums and galleries in Moscow, Washington, Paris, Saint Petersburg, Cologne, Karlsruhe, Friedrichshafen, Venice, and Milan from 1998 to 2000.

From 1996 to 1999 Avvakumov curated and designed exhibitions of the Moscow House of Photography. He took up photography professionally in 1999.

The exhibition MiSCeLLaNeouS illustrates Avvakumov's interest in constructivist photography on the one hand and in the city as a complex environmental organism on the other. The photographic themes which he prefers, just as in his architectural and artistic designs are wooden scaffolding and cranes, staircases and fences, trolleybus cables and advertising legends, engineering constructions and historical monuments, walls and bridges. The symbolic, typological, historical and cultural layers together depict the living urban fabric, whose essence falls under the lens of the photographer and architect.