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Hereby I want to express my true gratitude for the support I got from the Warsaw Stefan Batory Foundation in costs of my travel from Warsaw to Novosibirsk & back. The project „Beyond Time Shelter" was really innovative and was a possibility for all participants to see and understand various art and life attitudes and strategies.

It shows that understanding and cooperation between people of different points of view is possible and can bring real positive effects. The project was perfectly prepared and executed by staff of OSI-Novosibirsk and many

supporting local organizations and people. All of them have so much energy and really interesting art & culture projects! Realization of these projects in future can change cultural situation in Russia. As we know, culture and specially contemporary art. are developed specially in Moscow & Petersburg. Local contemporary art. initiatives (performance, activities, photography, body art, social actions, installations, interventions, Internet, theory and documentation) should get more support in a future in the aim of breaking down the isolation of Siberian art from the World art exchange. Artists from Novosibisk really represent very high level of art consciousness. In opposition to some international so-called stars from Moscow, they are full of real idealism. The project gave artists from Novosibirsk, Ljubljana, Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw a possibility for cooperation and exchange of experiences and view points. In the project participated artists, for whom action art is a base & a starting point in art researches. It gives some hope for a future specially for an artist from Poland, because in Warsaw every year we can observe so-called Festival of Actions organized by Centre for Contemporary Art
Ujazdowski Castle and in a fact it is a simply conventional theatre festival! In this so-called action festival never participated any young or mid-age action & performance artists from Poland and also never participated still active classics of Polish action art: JERZY BERES, ZBIGNIEW WARPECHOWSKI & PRZEMYSLAW KWIEK! We are lucky that there are also other initiatives like the festival of real performance art "Imagination Castle" executed every year by Slupsk BWA Gallery in a castle in Bytów (north of Poland). Also ANDRZEJ MROCZEK, director of BWA Gallery in Lublin east south of Poland) continues his full of courage politics of 70s & 80s and still shows performance art. His way continues MONIKA SZEWCZYK, director of The Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok (north east of Poland). I observe Russian art scene from 1993 and I am more and more sure that Polish curators can learn a lot from Russian curators. Specially worth to mention are books and exibitions prepared by EVGENYA KIKODZE & ANDREY EROFEYEV. Worth to mention is energy and historical researches done by Russian curators in a situation they get small salaries from their institutions (in 1998 a museum curator’s salary was 450 Rubles - the equivalent for a train ticket Moscow - Samara). A situation of polish curators is not so horribly difficult. And it is really hard to understand why still no curator of one of so many Polish art  institutions wouldn’t like to do historical researches and prepare a books and exhibitions on two Warsaw heroic artistic alternative initiatives of 1970 continued till the half of 80s - two off institutional institutions: ANDRZEJ PARTUM’S BUREAU OF POETRY & KWIEKULIK’S PDDiU. But polish curators still have time, money and energy to produce huge books on academic modern traditionalists who had in 60s & 70s hundreds of exhibitions & catalogues in official state art   institutions. Why still no one piece of art by KWIEKULIK (ZOFIA KULIK & PRZEMYSLAW KWIEK signied so their works in 1971-1987) was bought by one of so many Polish National Museums or by CCA Warsaw, Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw or Museum of Art in Lódz ? And collections of these huge institutions are full of works by conservative modernistic academics!

BEYOND TIME SHELTER
200 m. from the centre square of Novosibirsk city [the middle of Eurasia, Western Siberia, 700 km from Mongolia] 12 men-artists were hermetically closed in an atom bomb shelter for about 77 hours. No windows. Only electric light. No sounds from outside. No clocks, no watches. No TV, no radio. But a far sound of underground city train line. No alcohol, no drugs, no coffee. Only water, tea, condensed milk, sugar, potato, black bread, green peas cans, meat cans. One WC without doors. One wash-hand basin. Smoking in a separate room. Cause of cold almost everybody started to wear prepared for us typical Russian workers quilted jackets and Sibirian felt boots. We slept on mattresses on beds of boards. Most of the participants had photo cameras. There was also a Russian typing machine. EVGENIY [ZHENIA] IVANOV (photographer from Novosibirsk) made permanent photo-documentation of all events. Video-documentation of discussions and performances was also made. And this video-camera was in a fact a dictatorial power centre in this small anarchistic community (a power belonged also to someone who decided when to turn off electric light). At the beginning DMITRIY PILIKIN [conceptual artist from St. Petersburg] started to hew out with a hammer in a concrete wall two Russian texts separated by a vertical line: TO THE END OF ART IS LEFT / TO THE BIRTH OF PUSHKIN IS LEFT (today Russia without ideas waits for any idea as for the second Pushkin’s birth). He finished after ca. three days. Some men decided to make photos of situations simulating life in a "zone" [a camp for criminals in Russia]. For instance: a knife in someone’s back. KONSTANTIN SKOTNIKOV [KRISPINUS] [a teacher at Drawing, Painting & Sculpture department of Novosibirsk Architecture & Art Academy, the author of analytical program text for the shelter project, co-author of the project conception] started a series of performances titled: I CAN NOT COME INTO DISCOURSE WITHOUT PAIN. He had two traps for parts of his body (like mouse- traps). He put his head into a hole in a wall and next moment we could see his mouth caught with a trap. Next his nose was trapped, next his tongue was trapped, next his face was trapped. In another performance his nose and penis was trapped. JERZY TRUSZKOWSKI [visual artist & independent culture analyst from Warsaw off-institutional Institut of Critical Art] started to make a huge wall installation. A small black glaze cross (culture) on an old green wainscot (civilization), a big black glaze cross (Malevich) on a red-pink-orange-white dripping painting (high modernism). A big red five-pointed star (communistic) curved with a hammer (there was no chisel) in a brick-wall, a small black turned up side down five-pointed star (anarchistic) in a center of the red star. SLAVA MIZIN [from Novosibirsk Yuri Kondratyuk Historical & Technical Foundation, co-author of the project conception] and DMITRIY BULNIGYN [from Novosibirsk Innovation Museum Center, department of the Kondratyuk Foundation] almost all time did performances to video camera lit bit similar to the "Performances for Photo" series of 1979-1986 done by a Polish art group LÓDZ KALISKA. MIZIN, BULNIGYN & OLEG KUREEV [anti-individualistic anarchist from Moscow, editor of a web sided periodical "Mailradek"] declared a necessity of anonymous & collective art. Their program was similar to program of a Polish ACTIVITIES group of 1970-1972 (PRZEMYSLAW KWIEK, JAN STANISLAW WOJCIECHOWSKI, ZOFIA KULIK). MARKO KOVACIC (visual artist from Ljubljana) did some delicate interventions in the shelter room: he put painted black or red electric bulb in different places. KONSTANTIN GAIDAI (a student at Novosibirsk Architecture & Art Academy) did some photos of his white painted face with pieces of white form. JOZE BARŠI (visual artist, architect & academic teacher from Ljubljana) documented the shelter room with an automatic photo camera every 5 minutes, deciding not to document any art event. VALERY KLAMM (architect, Novosibirsk Open Society Institute, an initiator of the project) did an installation of breads and a bag of potato got stuck on a pale. The title was painted red paint on boards: FOR MR. MAUSE FROM ST.KLAUSE.

We had finished a last discussion on individualistic and collective art, I had got the best compliment in my life (that I was a counter-revolutionist), men were doing something, I was sitting at a long table opposite to a corridor, when a sound of opening doors was heard and in a corridor I saw three men with TV cameras, journalists and critics coming into the shelter.

THE MAIN PIECE OF ART WAS OUR 77 HOURS OUT-OF-TIME BEING IN A SEPARATION
FROM THE WORLD IN THE CONCRETE ATOM SHELTER.
A day later: a round table discussion artists - critics (from Moscow, Krasnoyarsk & St.Petersburg). Cultural coordinator of the project was LUDMILA IVASHINA from OSI-Novosibirsk, local coordinators: BARBARA BORCIC from OSI-Ljubljana & ELZBIETA GRYGIEL from Batory Foundation Warsaw [my very special thanks for help in my busy time between two openings of my one-man shows in Collegium Polonicum Slubice & Galeria Promocyjna Warsaw]. "Beyond Time Shelter", 28 October - 2 November 1999, Novosibirsk, Russian

Federation.
Jerzy Truszkowski, Born 1961, works & lives in Warsaw. Visual artist [performer, painter, photographer, installator, draftsman] and culture analyst. [many texts published in 1983-1986 in off-off alternative art magazines „Tango" & „Halo Halo" and in 90’s in „Exit", „Obieg", „Magazyn Sztuki / Art. Magazine", „Gazeta Malarzy i Poetów". Author of a book „Critical Art in Poland" vol. 1 & 2. published by the Municipal Gallery Arsenal in Poznan. EXIT quarterly prize winner for 1999 year.