Modern reality has taught us that the identity of each person is not sealed but rather a dynamic set of identities: national, cultural, social, gender, and professional. Any social tensions, all the more catastrophes, destabilize their delicate balance in the individual and interfere with the understanding of oneself as a part or product of something specific. A modern artist, entering into arguments with tradition and school, with society and power, with themselves and their art, inevitably faces questions — especially since the catastrophic challenges of recent years’ request answers. How is the identity of a modern artist constructed, what does it consist of, what shapes it? Composers of different generations, as well as experts from various areas of the modern art scene — from visual arts to theatre — will try and offer some answers to these questions.

VLADIMIR RANNEV
composer

Graduated from the composition department of the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 2003, Rannev composes both acoustic and electroacoustic music, which has been performed in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the UK, Finland, Japan, and the USA by various ensembles, including the Orchestra of the St. Petersburg Conservatory Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra, eNsemble, Studio of New Music, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Neue Vocalsolisten, and Ensemble Mosaik, among others. Rannev also works in theater, where he took part in numerous staging projects in several theaters, such as Alexandrinsky Theatre (St. Petersburg) and the Theatre Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). His opera Two Acts, with a libretto by Dmitri A. Prigov, premiered at the Hermitage Museum (with Ensemble Mosaik and conductor Enno Poppe) and won the Grand Prix of the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize in 2013. The opera Drillalians was nominated for the National Theatre Golden Mask Prize in 2016, and the opera Prose was awarded the National Theatre Golden Mask Prize in 2019.