Anastasia Shavlokhova
Anastasia Shavlokhova is a Berlin-based curator and program director with an extensive background in cultural project management and exhibition-making. She is widely recognised for her work promoting contemporary art from the so-called “New East”, encompassing Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia.
Anastasia is the founder of Szena Gallery, a chamber art space in Moscow that explores the artistic practices of emerging and mid-career artists from the New East. The gallery offers a stage for diverse voices and helps artists to develop their own creative language, while fostering connections between local and international art communities.
From 2019 to 2021, she was the Head of the Cultural Creative Agency (CCA) at the Qatari-Russian Center for Cooperation in Moscow. During her tenure, she curated and managed a series of critically-acclaimed cultural projects, including the Mawaheb Music Festival and the exhibition Qatar between Land and Sea: Through Art and Heritage at the State Ethnographical Museum in Saint Petersburg. As part of the CCA’s activities, Anastasia oversaw Turbulence, an open call for Russian artists at the Cosmoscow art fair in Moscow. She also initiated East-East magazine, a print and digital cultural publication aiming to reinvent the notion of the East.
Anastasia studied art history and criticism at the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design. After graduating in 2007, she co-founded and curated the pioneering independent open studio Nepokorennye, which propelled an entire cohort of remarkable young St. Petersburg artists into successful careers. Anastasia curated multiple shows of Nepokorennye artists across Russia, as well as at La Triennale di Milano.
In 2008, she co-founded the START project at the Centre for Contemporary Art Winzavod in Moscow, where she curated 11 exhibitions of the works by up-and-coming young Russian artists, many of whom went on to gain international fame, among them artists like Evgeny Antufiev.
Anastasia’s curatorial portfolio includes multiple shows at major Russian cultural institutions, among them The Space of Silence at the iconic Constructivist landmark factory Krasnoe Znamya in St. Petersburg (2009), the video art festival Video Capture, co-curated with Victoria Ilyushkina (2010), Marble by Fabio Viale at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2011), One Place Next to Another at the Centre for Contemporary Art Winzavod, co-curated with Lukas Toepfer (2015), and Nepokorennye Avenue at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2017), co-curated with Anastasia Skvortsova.
Together with Ukrainian curator Kostiantyn Doroshenko and artist Oleg Kulik, she co-curated Apocalypse and Renaissance in Chocolate House, an exhibition of works by Ukrainian and Russian artists, in Kyiv in 2012.
In addition to that, she co-founded the Moscow Philosophical Club, which she co-curated with Andrey Shental. Running from 2014 to 2019, the Philosophical Club was an independent platform for critical thinking and discussion, covering five thematic blocks: Contemporary Russian Philosophy, Soviet Philosophy in the Shadow of Marxism, Aesthetics and its Discontents (Theoretical, Scientific, and Speculative Investigations), and New Cosmologies.
Anastasia is a frequent speaker at public talks and conferences hosted by various international institutions, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow.
She was awarded the Kariotida Award by the Russian Ministry of Culture as the best emerging curator in 2011 and is a holder of the German Chancellor Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2012-2013).