Art-Ovrag
A festival of new culture in Vyksa, 2011–2013
Vyksa is a steel town of under sixty thousand people in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, built around a metallurgical works founded in the eighteenth century. From 2011 it was also the site of one of the first public-art festivals in the country to work at the scale of an entire town.
The festival was founded in 2011 on the initiative of Irina Sedykh, chair of the board of trustees of the OMK-Uchastie charitable foundation, with the support of the United Metallurgical Company and the Vyksa Steel Works. Its first three editions were curated by Konstantin Grouss — artist, choreographer and curator, artistic director of the international cultural project Art-Residence and of ZERO Dance Gallery — with the artist-architect Dmitry Alekseev as co-curator. The festival's own front page described Grouss as ‘author of the idea and of the themes of the festivals of 2011, 2012 and 2013’.
The three editions
The first festival took place in the ravine of the town’s Park of Culture and was timed to International Children’s Day. It worked with young people of Vyksa aged six to twenty, among them residents of a rehabilitation centre for minors and pupils of a special school. The programme was calligraphy, three-dimensional pavement drawing, graffiti, animation and urban installation, with breakdance and hip-hop battles between teams from Vyksa, Nizhny Novgorod, Murom, Vladimir and Moscow.
The second festival took its theme from the hyperboloid water tower Vladimir Shukhov built for the Vyksa steelworks. A street exhibition, Towers of the World, opened in the town, and an open-air gallery of contemporary art began to form. Murals were made by Pasha 183, Slava PTRK, Rustam Salemgaraev, Andrey Berger and Marat Morik; the London architect Thomas Nugent, the Japanese artist Mayuko Ogawa, the German street artist EVOL and the French artist Philippe Baudelocque worked in the town. The street-art programme of 2012 and 2013 was curated by Nikita Nomerz.
The third and largest festival. Attendance rose from about five thousand in 2012 to about eighteen thousand, with fourteen art objects across nineteen sites, thirty-eight street-art works and artists from thirteen countries. The sculptors and artists included Loop pH (London), Rob Mulholland (Scotland), Riccardo Murelli (Italy), Gábor Miklós Szőke (Hungary), Clemens Behr (Germany), Eve Bailey (New York), EVOL (Berlin) and Philippe Baudelocque (Paris). Szőke’s six-metre wooden unicorn referred to the heraldic emblem of the Batashev brothers, who founded the town. The stage programme brought Battery Dance Company (New York), Stomp (London), Sasha Pushkin (Berlin), Mimetic (Geneva), Andrey Oyd (Riga) and VJ Amoeba (London).
Two competitions, 2013
The Balancing Pavilion — an international architecture competition led by Dmitry Alekseev, won by the Spanish architect Javier Ponce. The festival’s own report records six hundred entrants and more than two hundred and fifty projects.
The Public Art Prize — an international open prize for artists, main award one hundred thousand roubles, with five shortlisted projects realised in the town: Natalia Khokhonova (Yekaterinburg), Sasha Kurmaz (Kyiv), Partizaning (Moscow), Sergey Yaralov (Moscow) and Oksana Chepelik (Kyiv). The jury was Anna Gor (director, Volga branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts), Irina Sedykh, Kirill Preobrazhensky (Rodchenko School), Arseny Sergeev, Matteo Ghidoni (editor-in-chief, San Rocco), Mike Hentz, Maria Troshina (Tatlin), Dmitry Alekseev and Konstantin Grouss.
Partners and recognition
The 2013 festival was held with the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, which showed the exhibition The Shadow of the Green City, and the Instituto Cervantes. Media partners included RIA Novosti, The Moscow Times, Moskovskie Novosti, archi.ru, Blouin ArtInfo, Artkhronika and Dialog Iskusstv.
In December 2013 the edition received the «уЛичный вклад» (Street Contribution) award for Event of the Year, presented at Winzavod in Moscow at the close of the First International Street Art Forum MOST and judged by a hundred experts, jointly to Konstantin Grouss and Nikita Nomerz.
Afterwards
The festival continued under other curators — the architect Oleg Shapiro of Wowhaus from 2014, Anton Kochurkin from 2017, and Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich from 2019 — and was renamed Vyksa Festival in 2022. Writing its fifteen-year history in 2022, Forbes Life named four curators across its existence and described Grouss among them as ‘the choreographer Konstantin Grouss’.
Photographs
The web archive preserved only preview-size copies of most of the galleries on this site. The photographs at full resolution are in the Art-Residence albums on Flickr.
2013 — the whole festival
2013 — visual art
2013 — public art
2013 — street art
2013 — dance
2013 — music
2013 — exhibitions
2013 — master classes
2012
2011
Festival booklets
PDFArt-Ovrag 2013. Garden City — programme, participants and map of sites.
PDFArt-Ovrag 2012. The Tower — programme and participants.
Finding your way around the Russian site
- Кураторы — the curators
- Организаторы — organisers and partners
- Участники — participants, 2013
- Программа — programme, 2013
- Премия паблик-арт — the Public Art Prize and its jury
- Завершение III фестиваля — the closing report, 5 June 2013
- Арт-Овраг 2012 / 2011 — the two earlier festivals
- Фото — the photograph galleries
- Главная — the front page
About this archive. The hosting for street-art-ovrag.ru was deleted on 16 February 2026 for non-payment, and the provider’s backups a month later. The site was rebuilt from copies held by the Internet Archive and republished on its original address in August 2026. Around four hundred pages and eight hundred photographs survived. The English version of the 2013 site could not be recovered: its translations lived in the database, which is gone. Where the archive kept nothing, the page says so rather than pretending otherwise.