The upcoming ARTBAT FEST will provide the city with approximately 6 new vivid unforgettable graffiti. The artists from Russia and Kazakhstan will colorize gray walls of ordinary houses.

"Russia and Kazakhstan are the countries that once were a part of a unified ideological block, linked with brotherly relations; and now they are business partners and good neighbors. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they began to create their own concept of national and state history to various degrees reviewing the common history, where the main task was to build its unique historical narrative and its own national identity. General ideological views were replaced with a private authentic one. The cultural memory in the process appeared to be a set of ideas about the past, as well as about all the heroes, victories and tragedies, which in many ways are fixed in the memory, as well as a set of different forms of this fix. Production of historical knowledge and its rationing become the most important task of the young state, through which a meaning is given to the past, and hope for the future is determined.

At the same time in the rest of the world there are different processes; on the one hand it is globalization and multiculturalism leveling national traits, on the other there is the rise of movements for the rights and identity of minorities and regions. In this regard, national cultures turn into the intensive exchange on the background of public policy delineating the contours of historical identity.

The General in the Particular is a view of young artists from countries that once were a part of a single political unit, it is a review of their common history since the collapse of the USSR. Each author is a carrier of a new national identity, which is a certain perspective or vision for a shared past. This vision inevitably contains distortion, reduction and new elements that probably are not a defect of vision, as well as reflection of the new state and the self of the countries represented by the authors, thus building up a new dialogue on a common past.