The history of this teaching conceals somewhere deep in hard-to-find scripts (as the "Suburban Trips" volumes and the "Pastor" magazine), APT-ART's sorcery and vigilant meditations at faraway Bakhchisaray. Conscious hermetism doesn't except explicit exercise, which could be observed at recurrent exhibitions (some with explanatory texts). Surface politeness of the permanent dialogue between Noma and the rest of Moscow art, is in fact filled with strife. So, we tried to make a proposal to some of the "devoted" ones, to exercise in the military form of information transfer.

Here's one uncertain legend about the origin of Tarot cards: once upon a time Egyptian priests have had a problem of saving their spiritual wisdom in the face of invading barbarians. How could they preserve eternal knowledge for ages without disguising it by unworthy conquerors? Virtue was too fragile, religion too tightly bound to real people who may always have some foible; and they've decided to entrust the whole system of inherited knowledge to vice as it was ineradicable. To vice, as no religion have ever encouraged individual studies in sorcery and fortune-telling. Thus the priests invented Tarot cards, encoding ancient wisdom into simple yet sapid symbols.

Tarot is divided into two unequal parts: Major Arcane, compounded of 22 cards, and Minor Arcane, which, depending on canon, consists of up to 56 cards.

Having denoted the obvious correspondence between the ancient teaching and Moscow Conceptualism - may the true esoterics forgive us such an easy-minded blasphemy, - we called some of the artists belonging to Noma, to play this game. The artists were Nikita Alexeev, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Elena Elagina, Igor Makarevich, Victor Pivovarov, Vadim Zakharov and Pavel Pepperstein. Distinct conceptuality of Tarot was just one premise to involve them in the Tarot project. Another one based on spontaneous tradition of Moscow Conceptualism, the tradition of author-made albums. This tradition started with albums by Kabakov and Pivovarov, and continued in other artists' stalwart loving to Guttenbergian form of expressing themselves within the borders of their general art system. Choosing Tarot also seemed preferable and advantageous because with all the seamless integrity of initial codes, the pack itself has been embodied into almost innumerable variants; just to name Egyptian, Spanish, French, Gypsy and so on, some of the variants considerably digressed from the original canons. This, too, well corresponded with variety of Moscow Conceptualism layouts - by Makarevich, by Alexeev, by Pivovarov, by Zvezdochetov, you name it... Respectively some of the artists chose the full pack with both Arcana, some made just Major Arcane, some - Minor one.

This exhibition presents esoteric "albums" by the first five artists from our list; we hope the rest will follow.

For the most full development of the project, we invited Sergei Epikhin, a free-lance art-critic, who is famous for his analytic and purely esoteric interpretations; we are also glad to present the view of E.Glosser, an esoteric inquirer well known in professional circles, who agreed to comment our project, as for correctness of our broad historical correspondence, and for variants of artists' approach to Tarot.