The exhibits include works by artists from Uzbekistan, Russia, France, Kazakstan, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan, who represent different age groups and various artistic categories and policies. This said, they are all united by a shared principle of methodological vision of reality and thinking about the past relevant to the present and the future.

The theme of the exhibition is linked with historical experience and cultural events, and seeks to sharpen thinking about the present as well as emotional, intellectual and thought-provoking occurrences.

The exhibition uses the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego – “Even in Arcadia I exist” – to give it postmodernist ambivalence, and amends it to “Even in Arcadia I exist/do not exist”.

While to many people the whole history may seem a fickle and massive “burden of knowledge” or an unshakeable edifice of experience accumulated by history, to a contemporary artist oriented towards a free interpretation of well-known truths, it may come as a mobile and flexible structure arranged from the position of the present he or she is concerned with.

The word Arcadia has the same root as the Greek word Arktika, and means “a country of bears”. How has the word come to mean “a land of milk and honey where everyone lives in peace and harmony”?

In ancient Greece, Arcadia was the name of a region in the Peloponnesus peninsula. It was inhabited by shepherds and farmers famed for their pure morals and hospitality. Later, French court poets of the 17th-18th centuries invented a tale of Arcadia Land, where jovial shepherds led a carefree life of pastoral idyll. Their “Arcadian idylls” were long remembered. Later, a newly coined phrase “Arcadian shepherds” was used to derisively refer to happy-go-lucky people. This, in turn, gave rise to another notion: a utopia, illusions, eternal hopes, grand modernistic projects leading to catastrophes.

The project centres on the notions of Time, Life, and Art, which are united by the artists’ personal experience. The choice of Ming o’rik as the venue for the exhibition is expected to put each work into a particular context and boost the originality of interpretation. The artists must break free from the confines of expositional presentation for the sake of another principle: create a specific space where various individual projects and collective efforts mingle and clash in a thinking space. When this is achieved, the show turns into more than just a collection of visual aesthetic objects; it conveys the artist’s conceptual message across.