 It's very nice to be here. I'm Susan Katz, and I direct CC Arts Wing's office in St. Petersburg, Russia, and our program, which we call Art Prospect. And Art Prospect is an ongoing program of residency exchanges, public art festivals, and educational programs in post-Soviet countries, which focuses on innovative ways that artists address social concerns, engage local communities, and transform urban environments. And we work in collaboration with 13 organizations in 10 countries in the region, who all share our common goals and values. And through these programs, we saw that there's so much interesting work being done by artists and curators, and very little is known about this work in the field of socially engaged art, either in the region or internationally. And so we decided to commission a research study about what is going on in the region. And we asked our partners to create these, to the next part. So I first want to say with the name of this publication, which is called A Miracle or Misunderstanding Social Engaged Practices in the Art Prospect Network Countries. And so we asked our partners to answer questions based on their experience, knowledge, and research about social practice art in their cities, and asked them questions about the history and practice today, the impact and perception, and resources, and documentation. And we put this information together into a publication that is available both in English and in Russian online. And it has been divided into three sections. The first is called Pioneers and Practices. The second is called Perceptions and Responses, and the third is Resources and References. And so it's looking very closely at what happened in these countries and what's going on. And it also includes four additional essays by artists and curators in these countries about specific projects that they worked on and issues that they deal with. I'm just gonna quickly go through some of the pages from this publication and really encourage you to download it and take a look at it. It's available on two websites right now, and just to give you a taste of what this publication is about. So each of the profiles begins with a map showing people where these countries are located. And the first question we asked our partners was, what does social-engaged art mean in your region? And the answers that we got were quite varied. Here this is a quote from our partner in Baku about what social-engaged art means. So they talked about the history and some practices of the region, and it also includes a lot of really wonderful visual elements in the publication. This is a picture of a project which I believe took place about 15 or 20 years ago by a group of artists in Azerbaijan who were doing a project about the environment. And this shows, again, Ukraine and talking about the definition of social-engaged art, which they see as much more related to social interaction and politics. And they talked about social-engaged art being very much related to participatory activists and research practices, playing an important role in contemporary art and how they're closely related to the current processes that they're going through in the Ukraine. In Armenia, our partners defined social-engaged art in a much more political way and talked about political art and activism. And this is a photo from one of their projects, again, showing how in the context of Armenia, social-engaged art is very much about politics and activism. The second part of the publication focuses on perceptions and responses to social-engaged art, how both the public and arts community looks at social-engaged art and how the media responds to it. And our partners in Kyrgyzstan talked about a project that they did as part of the Art Prospect Public Art Festival and how they were very surprised by the public response to the works that were put up. In Georgia, it was interesting that our partners said that the arts community is generally very skeptical about socially-engaged art. And in Uzbekistan, they said that the public reacts positively to independent artists while the reaction of the press is defined by the expense of their own boldness. So of course, we very much found that the definitions of social-engaged art varied depending on the context that the artists were working in. And I hope that you will enjoy looking and reading about the different histories and practices in these countries. The final part of each country profile includes references, which are very useful because it gives people information both about the organizations working in this field in these countries but also often provides articles that give you more information about particular projects or time periods in each of the countries. So you can find the publication both on the CEC ArtsLink website as well as the Art Prospect website. I just wanted to finish with a quotation from Victor Mitiano who wrote the introduction to the publication. And we got the name for the publication from this, and he said that social-engaged art in the former Soviet countries is either a miracle or a misunderstanding for there are too many reasons why it should not exist. There are too many social, political, and discursive circumstances occasioned by the post-Soviet condition that should have mitigated against its emergence. However, things are more complicated and more paradoxal than that. So I hope that you will all take a look at the publication and please share your comments with us about the publication. It's really at the beginning of investigating what's going on in these countries. So we very much hope that people will send us more information which we can include on our websites and continue this study. Thank you.