The annual International Festival of Contemporary Art Alanica is a landmark event in the field of contemporary art in the North Caucasus. For 13 years, the Festival has presented the entire range of artistic practices, trends in the development of art, curatorial approaches, acquainted the local public with the names of foreign, Russian contemporary artists and curators, formed a topical agenda that significantly influences the regional cultural environment.

In 2020, the pandemic has introduced adjustments into the coherent algorithm of the annual event: the arrival of the Festival participants is not possible this year.

We hope that next year the meetings of the artists with each other and with the people on the land of Ossetia, as well as their immersion in the local cultural environment, and their artistic statements about all this – in fact, everything that the Festival Alanica consists of – will happen.

In the meantime, following the today’s widespread practice, we let the Festival Alanica sail online on a specially created media platform, which, according to the laws of the virtual world, will allow maximum immersion in the cultural, natural, historical environment of Ossetia, meet the participants of the Festival, see their art projects created for Alanica 2020, discuss them with the authors during online presentations. The artists who have already visited Vladikavkaz and left with a dream to come back, as well as the artists who have never been to the Caucasus, but expressed a great desire to join the project, are invited to participate in the Festival 2020.

Besides, with the Festival 2020, we are launching the Contemporary Urgency Program dedicated to the topic that is important for the North Caucasus – the integration of contemporary art into the traditional cultural environment. That is why the participants are offered 12 objects of historical, cultural and natural heritage of Ossetia. Encyclopedic information, photos, videos are complemented by funny, romantic, nostalgic stories of local residents about these places.

The collection of project ideas related to this issue will continue in the future, probably with the expansion of the project geography to the entire North Caucasus. The format of the Festival allows us creating a collective-museful project – «Sketches of the imaginary», rare in its significance and content, which can be watched by a much larger number of viewers on such a modern and timely generated media platform.

The Festival will be held from   December 29-th, 2020 to  March 1-st, 2021 . 
The Festival program includes the online opening ceremony, presentations of participants, the exhibition of ideas of art projects. Each event is a stage in the program of integrating contemporary art into the traditional environment.