ILMIRA BOLOTYAN

Late September 2018, a few weeks after the project ARTISTS’ PROMOTION AGENCY started, Bolotyan was invited to teach a December course on artists’ promotion at the Higher School of Economics Art and Design School. The course included only four classes but promised to teach students to analyze artistic strategies of the contemporary art practitioners as well as to develop their independent self-promotion skills.

By uniting 13 active students of the course in late December 2018, Bolotyan created a closed group “We are artists” on Facebook where she would answer questions regarding the art community, residencies, exhibitions, etc., monthly charging the small participation fee. Four curatorial course projects created after the lecture “Artist as a curator” were combined into one project “Artists’ Promotion Agency” and submitted by Bolotyan to the contest “Workshops 2019” at the Center for Creative Industries “Fabrika”, Moscow. The APA won the “Experiment” nomination. Four group exhibitions of the students and their fellows, “A Normal Daughter” curated by Tarya Polyakova , “The Сontemporary Art Pyramid” by Aleksandr Mekhryakov , “Y Landscape” by Anastasia Maslovskaya ,  “Draw This! The Art Therapy Case for Seven Artists” by Olga Ornata, were held at Fabrika in April–June 2019. The participants took part in each other’s projects, increasing the number of exhibitions for their CVs. After all, that is what really counts for an artist’s promotion.

As a follow-up to the project, the final event where Bolotyan met her followers was held and the catalogs of each project were printed out and then placed in the Archive of contemporary art at the Garage Museum. This way, Bolotyan enabled her students not only to gain artistic and curatorial experience, which became a debut for most of them at a cultural institution. She also created conditions for them to win the contest at the CCI Fabrika, even though the age of participants and the format of their shows did not meet the contest’s requirements, get media coverage, create a CV and portfolio in just a year, and finally earn a place in art history by getting the artists and curators registered in the Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN).

Besides, Bolotyan was selling the audio interview with Russian artist Taus Makhacheva about the artist’s promotion, collecting money through the APA platform to produce catalogs of her students’ exhibitions and organize lectures featuring the speakers of the project “The Сontemporary Art Pyramid” created by her student Aleksandr Mekhryakov. She also created her own course “Self-promotion for artists in the regions (and beyond)”.  The other results of the project you can read in an article "APA, or Adventures of Marketing in Contemporary Art"