Yes to New Worlds: ITMO Graduate Nadezhda Bey Opens Her First Personal Exhibition

Yes to New Worlds! is the first personal exhibition of Nadezhda Bey that put together the artist’s brightest, most significant works from 2021-2023. The display itself is a phygital (physical + digital) space, presenting works in VR, AR, MR, and objective reality at the same time. Ksenia Makarenko, an art historian and member of the Parazit art group, curated the exhibition.

“Ksenia Makarenko and I chose the title that reflects the exhibition’s focus – Yes to New Worlds! This exhibition explores new contexts and aesthetics and the heterogeneity and hybrid nature of our contemporary reality. It also taps into the infinite opportunities for creating new worlds and reimagining the existing one through new technologies. Digitalization changes our culture, and technologies can give us a chance to look at our world from a new perspective and to take our perception of it outside the usual paradigm,” shared Nadezhda Bey.

The center stage of the exhibition is taken by a “VR forest” – 14 pieces that can be seen in VR headsets, all of them hanging from the ceiling.

“As my works were created in VR, I want visitors to be able to experience them the way I do – to look at them from different angles and even walk inside these paintings,” adds Nadezhda Bey.

Apart from VR, visitors can enjoy works in other phygital formats: lightboxes with characters, 3D-printed figurines, lenticular images with an optical illusion of depth, video projections, and TV screens. According to Nadezhda Bey, for a VR artist, a variety of formats is a means of adapting to the existing conditions of the artistic environment, as well as an opportunity to explore and augment the virtual reality using other tools.

Also on display at the exhibition is an entire world of “live” creatures and lines that can be seen via an MR headset. Having put it on, visitors can freely walk around the exhibition space and interact with virtual creatures with their hands, while also meeting characters from other exhibited pieces.

Nadezhda Bey is a graduate of ITMO’s Art & Science Master’s program; the artist specializes in XR art. In 2023, she received the ASTA Award, as well as the Sergey Kuryokhin award in the category Best Media Object with her performance MINIM. In her works, Ms. Bey looks to reassemble the environment from the pieces of the “broken” modern reality and sci-fi elements, abstractions, and symbols. The artist believes that in this new space it is possible to learn to be flexible in the chaos of modernity – and build your own world out of it.

Now on at Interactive Gallery, the exhibition will be accompanied by weekly mediations, artist talks, discussions, performances, and other events. For instance, the schedule includes the Mirmecode performance that will be demonstrated in two realities simultaneously: the VR INTERACTIVE space and the VRChat platform. All events will be announced on the gallery’s VK page. The exhibition will be open until May 17 at Interactive Gallery on Moyka River Embankment 37 (tickets can be found here).