Debates on that borderline between street art and vandalism are pretty much guaranteed to reach a deadlock. What should cross our minds when we see a spay-painted fa?ade in the city center: “This is drop dead pretty” or “I don’t know who did this, but they’re dead!” Can we learn to tell good and bad street art apart?

We may rely either on our own taste or on that of gallery curators: they've been paying a great deal more attention to graffiti artists lately. This increased attention may be explained by the fact that street artists are most sincere when it comes to themselves or their audience. They invest effort, time and funds into creating their pieces and don’t really think about compensation or pleasing somebody else. However, when an artist gets to a gallery or a museum, he or she has to deal with certain restricitions. It’s not always as easy as it may seem.

We invited 8 artists that we find most interesting and that have a vast experience working both in the street and in galleries. Paintings by some of them are sold around the world and the number of successfully implemented projects is captivating. But what is important here is that despite their commercial success, they remember where they started and they stick to the street.

UNuseless Person – that's the name we chose for this exhibition. This topic is all but superficial. It strives to tell us how important it is for an author of any kind to be a part of things, to have a chance to speak out and be heard. Artists will reflect on way to be unuseless in art and not to turn useless in the street.

We decided to avoid any usual surfaces and go for columns instead of walls. We’ll have just as many participants as there’re columns on Manege’s fa?ade. And we deliberately put an extra and seemingly “useless’” one offering our audience to meditate on its symbolic meaning. The venue perfectly fits this concept: artists will create their works in the square by the Manege’s western fa?ade. They will gradually approach the exhibition hall reminding us they may be unuseless there.