New Landscape features seven award-winning artists: Alexander Gronsky, Anastasia Tsayder, Liza Faktor, Max Sher, Petr Antonov, Sergey Novikov, Valeri Nistratov and their projects created within the past 15 years. The exhibition was curated by Anastasia Tsayder and Petr Antonov.

At each venue the exhibition was accompanied by a series of panel discussions and lectures on the subjects of landscape, cultural studies and contemporary photography.

The exhibition is the first extended museum overview of contemporary Russian landscape photography.

New Landscape is presented with the support of Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre Foundation.

The works of Liza Faktor, the earliest among the featured projects see Siberia as the Russian frontier, once partially tamed but deserted anew.

Alexander Gronsky's Less than One explores the outermost regions of Russia where the average population often amounts to less than one person per square kilometre.

Documents of Nature by Valeri Nistratov, mainly shot along the fringes of Moscow looks for the marks of the nascent capitalism at the border between the urbanised and the rural.

The works by Max Sher and Petr Antonov explore similar changes, except they use built environment to record the emerging aesthetics.

Sergei Novikov's Grassroots turns contemporary Russian landscapes into a gigantic backdrop for the Russian amateur football.

Arcadia by Anastasia Tsayder looks at the relation between nature and man, but instead of finding an opposition discovers a strange co-existence as nature re-conquers urban space.

Lucius Burckhardt once remarked that the very word landscape implies that we are dealing with a certain concept only existing in our heads. Landscape is a technical term and used in relation to the idillic and repeatedly lauded in art Swiss landscape it means that what we actually see is not nature, but a landscape shaped by man, where people are engaged in agriculture, rural tourism, industry, etc. It is not just a suitable backdrop for our leisure or aesthetic studies. The more you know about the landscape in sight, the more intensely and thoroughly you can enjoy it. According to Burckhardt, studying geologic and geographic maps of an area, understanding the specifics of vegetation and geomorphological processes should make the landscape truly engulfing, make it reveal itself in an entirely different way. Its beauty in the eye of the beholder will be warranted by the garnered knowledge, the intellectual experience.

In the case of the works featured in this exhibition the studies of literature on geology or botanics should be replaced by more complex processes, dealing less so with knowledge or information. These processes will have more to do with reviving the collective and personal memory, the study of the particular social phenomena, architecture, etc. Looking at the featured works one cannot help but feel that to actually see nature, to develop an affection for a certain primeval landscape is scarcely possible. The Anthropocene has made it extinct.

Surface of Siberia, the earliest among the featured projects, is a study of Siberian landscape that looks at the signs of human interference. It is Siberia that is habitually linked with the heroic concept of 'conquering' nature. Despite the long-lasting relationship between this land and man, which according to Faktor has encompassed the spirit of exploration, romance, suffering and challenge, Siberia does not appear tamed or conquered. Furthermore, the social and economical turmoil brings its landscape to the state of primordial chaos and makes it appear conquerable again.

Less Than One is a portrayal of Russia's outermost regions. The title of Alexander Gronsky's project refers to the fact that areas with population density of less than one person per square kilometre account for one third of the country's total area. At the same time these remote and hard to access parts of Russia are home to only three per cent of its population. Alexander Gronsky's photographs become the visualisation of the vastness and emptiness of space.

Documents of Nature by Valeri Nistratov, mainly shot along the fringes of Moscow, looks at the transformations of the lanscape at the borders of the urbanised and the rural. It is here, against the backdrop of nature, that the economic and social transformations are easiest to discern. Observing the ways in which nature is transformed by man Valeri Nistratov documents the emergence of the new, half-urban half-rural inhabited space. Although Valeri Nistratov's work focuses on contemporary Russian landscape, similar processes may be observed within innumerable landscapes worldwide, as they are being changed by global consumerism.

Petr Antonov's project uses Moscow to focus on the transformations of built environment and explore elements making up the new urban landscape. The work aims at creating an imaginary 'catalogue of everything' listing the elements present in any post-Soviet urban landscape. Although the project catalogues situations that could occur anywhere in the post-Soviet space, all photographs were made in and around Moscow. This city has had the highest concentration of human and financial resources, which makes the changes in the cultural landscape appear most pronounced. Trees, cars, people and barriers turn out to be the most frequent elements found in the images and give the name to the project.

Max Sher's project spans across the total of roughly 70 inhabited locations—urban and suburban—within the post-Soviet space. The title of the project suggests an urge to read the landscape as a multi-layered medium of visual information, each layer supplying us with the evidence of a certain period in its formation. The project records the typical and familiar in the contemporary post-Soviet built environment, that which can be found in any inhabited location of the former Soviet Union. This way the focus of the project shifts from the notable—be that exotic or sublime—to the everyday, transforming the everyday into the notable.

In Grassroots Sergey Novikov explores how Russian amateur football finds itself in a variety of settings, from the Russian South to Permafrost, from the Caucasus to the Pacific Ocean. The stadiums that can be seen in Novikov's works serve their basic purpose of hosting the spectators in the absence of a television broadcast, while the amateur teams and their supporters follow patterns and regulations found in the professional football. Although these photographs show football matches, it is the scenic backgrounds of the vast country that appear to be their true protagonists.

Anastasia Tsayder's work looks for the idyllic Arcadia in Tolyatti, an industrial city rebuilt in the late 1960s to suit the needs of the USSR's largest car manufacturer VAZ. The new city made use of the most novel ideas in the socialist urban planning, while the concept of garden city was to make it a model living space for the working man. When the planned economy failed the urban vegetation was left to itself and started re-conquering urban space. The overgrown plants become the result and the illustration of the transformations, while also remaining their active participants. Looking at the modernist utopia 50 years after, Arcadia illustrates the idea of any man-made landscape being returned to nature in the end.

At each venue the exhibition was accompanied by a public programme with location-specific events ranging from discussions and lectures to workshops in contemporary art photography. The speakers included prominent philosophers, sociologists, art historians, architects such as Alexander Filippov, Alexandr Veleykis, Anton Gorlenko, Boris Klushnikov, Dmitry Bezouglov, Ekaterina Inozemtseva, Erika Wolf, Kirill Asse, Oleg Pachenkov, Sergei Sitar, Vitaly Kurennoj, Yury Grigoryan. The public programme at Yeltsin Cebtre in Ekaterinburg culminated in a stage reading of Dmitry Danilov's play A Man from Podolsk.