The exhibition's title is borrowed from Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov's 1909 poem of the same name which illustrates his doubts about normative social conventions and generally accepted laws of the universe. Khlebnikov expresses his desires to erase spatial and temporal boundaries and to create a formula for heightened creativity and eternal life. The poem's invocation of existential ambivalence, compounded with aspirations of prioritizing and liberating the creative spirit, are sentiments which can be easily translated to the contemporary zeitgeist .

The participating artists confront the loneliness and vulnerability at the heart of our era by interweaving black humor, satire, irony, the uncanny, and the grotesque into multi media works that reveal their fears, anxieties, and everyday truths with an absurdist spin. Amid a global culture of intolerance, mistrust, nationalism, aggression, radical inequality, as well as the existential threats of climate change, nuclear annihilation, and pestilence, the absurd has become an international lexicon, an aesthetic of mental escape, and a mode of survival in the decades following the fall of Soviet Communism and the rise of corrupt free-market capitalist regimes. "I don't know whether the Earth is spinning or not…" brings together emerging artists and poets who construct subtle ways of operating, resisting, and thriving within the shadows, and whose works are framed by the acknowledgement of absurdity's role in subverting the darkness all around us.

The digital platform will feature an essay by the curators as well as essays by Aleksei Borisionok (Vienna, Austria and Minsk, Belarus), Sofiá Casarin (México City, Mexico), with Lucía Hinojosa, and Vijay Masharani (New York, NY, USA), and newly commissioned poems by Caspar Heinemann (Glasgow, UK and Berlin, Germany), Catalina Ouyang (New York, NY, USA), and Galina Rymbu (Lviv, Ukraine).

ARTISTS

Anna Afonina (b. 1989, Tolyatti, Russia; lives and works in Moscow, Russia), with Maria Romanova (b. 1997, Moscow, Russia; lives and works in Moscow, Russia), Valeria Ghrai (b. 1992, Tyumen, Russia; lives and works in Moscow, Russia), and Anastasia Korotkova (b. 1990, Krasnodar, Russia; lives and works in Moscow, Russia)

Shadi Al-Atallah (b. 1994, Manama, Bahrain; lives and works in London, UK)

Joseph Buckley (b. 1990, Ellesmere Port, UK; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA)

Theresa Chromati (b. 1992, Baltimore, MD, USA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA)

Matt Copson (b. 1992, London, UK; lives and works between London, UK and Los Angeles, CA, USA)

Dagnini (b. 1987, Leningrad, Russia; lives and works in Moscow, Russia)

Hadi Fallahpisheh (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA)

Nicholas Grafia (b. 1990, Angeles City, Philippines; lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany), with Mikołaj Sobczak (b. 1989, Poznan, Poland; lives and works between Warsaw, Poland and Münster, Germany)

Evgeny Granilshchikov (b. 1985, Moscow, Russia; lives and works in Moscow, Russia)

Dan Herschlein (b. 1989, Bayville, NY, USA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA)

Pasmur Rachuiko (b. 1986, Rostov-on-Don, Russia; lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia)

Gaby Sahhar (b. 1992, London, UK; lives and works in London, UK)

Nikita Seleznev (b. 1990, Perm, Russia; lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia)

Fin Simonetti (b. 1985, Vancouver, Canada; lives and works in New York, NY, USA), with Gregory Kalliche (b. 1994, Miami, FL, USA; lives and works in New York, NY, USA)

Marina Stakhieva (b. 1992, Syktyvkar, Russia; lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia)

Sasha Zubritskaya (b. 1994, St. Petersburg, Russia; lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia)