World premiere of new AES+F photo collages at Moscow’s Garage Center – video

RUSSIAN ARTIST COLLECTIVE PHOTOGRAPHY VIDEO

Made up of artists Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovitch, Evgeny Svyatsky, and Vladmir Fridkes, internatinoally acclaimed Russian collective AES+F returns once again to Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in the center’s newest exhibition, “The Feast of Trimalchio“.

AES+F, 'Triptych #1. Panorama #2', 2010, digital collage. Image courtesy of Garage Center for Contemporary Culture.

Curated by Olga Sviblova, the collective’s interpretation of Satyricon, a work by Roman poet Gaius Petronious Arbiter, features a nine channel video installation of a hotel resort paradise threatened by disaster. The artists’ website states:

the atmosphere of ‘The Feast of Trimalchio’ can be seen as bringing together the hotel rituals of leisure and pleasure … On the other hand the ‘servants’ are more than attentive service-providers. They are participants in an orgy, bringing to life any fantasy of the ‘masters’.

The show, which runs from 19 June to 29 August, features both the video installation as well as several brand new, never-before-seen panoramic digital collages.

Watch Garage Center’s short preview of “The Feast of Trimalchio” here (video length, 1:07 mins)

EH/KN

Related Topics: AES+F, Russian, photography, video art

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Russian curators prosecuted for showcasing banned art: media round-up

RUSSIAN ART CURATORS BANNED ART LAW

After a two-year trial, two Russian curators, Yury Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev, were declared guilty of “inciting religious hatred,” despite massive protest. Although they escaped the three-year prison sentence demanded by the prosecution, the judge declared them guilty and each had to pay a hefty fine. Critics fear the results of this trial are proof of cultural oppression in Russia.

They had showcased art banned from other Russian museums in an exhibition entitled “Forbidden Art” at the Sakharov Museum.

Alexander Kosolapov's 'This Is My Body', from "My Blood My Body" series, one of the works from the controversial exhibition "Forbidden Art" at the Sakharov Museum.

Strong public interest in the case

Most media leans in favor of the Russian curators and sees the verdict as a sign of cultural oppression and censorship in Russia. However protesters from both sides were present outside the courthouse on the day of the ruling. Those offended by the paintings and who initiated the prosecution were mostly fundamentalist Russian Orthodox Christians while those against the prosecution consisted generally of artists and human rights activists. Multiple blogs and news agencies have covered the trial, ranging from arts websites to Russian interest magazines and blogs about human rights.

Extreme factions from both sides have voiced their protests. The New York Times reports that radical art performance group, Voina, released cockroaches into the courtroom, an act criticized by Samodurov. According to the Associated Press, extremist members of the prosecution threatened the curators in court, reminding them of the fate of Anna Alchuk, curator of “Caution: Religion!” who was found dead in Berlin in 2008.

Artists “incited religious hatred”

'Chechen Marilyn' by Blue Noses Group (2005, colour print, 100 x 75 cm), one of the works from the controversial exhibition "Forbidden Art" at the Sakharov Museum.

The works in question include an icon made of caviar, a depiction of Christ with a Mickey Mouse head, and an image of Christ with the McDonald’s sign and the words “This is my body”. There were also some non-Christian symbols included in the list of offensive images such as Chechen Marilyn and the Chinese invading the Kremlin. The exhibition spurred a lot of anger amongst religious groups.

In a video interview with Russia Today, a member of the Russian Orthodox Church explains that,

Orthodox believers, as citizens of their country…have the right to protect their sacred symbols. It was not the church that initiated this prosecution, but the people who were offended. The investigation proved that the art at the exhibit was offensive towards believers, and incited religious hatred.

The New York Times also mentioned, however, that Russian Orthodox Church officials believed that while displaying the paintings was criminal and the curators should be punished, they shouldn’t be imprisoned. Furthermore, the Russian Minister of Culture was critical of the prosecution.

A fight against censorship

The defendants’ view is that this exhibition was a critique of the materialism of Russian society and a fight against censorship of the arts, and had nothing to do with religion. Ironically, critics fear that results of the trial have shown that censorship is quite powerful in Russia.

Samodurov faced similar charges for a 2003 exhibition called “Caution: Religion!” He says the Church has reacted more strongly in the “Forbidden Art” trial.

Human rights and arts activists fully disapprove of the judge’s ruling, and are alarmed not only at the guilty verdict but at the fact that this trial even took place. The BBC News reported that thirteen renowned Russian artists signed an open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev protesting the trial. Russia Today reports that,

…much more concerning [than escaping the jail sentence] for people in their circumstances is what they’ve seen as a curb from their freedom of expression.

In addition support from other artists and curators has been prevalent. The Associated Press reports that Marat Gelman, a Moscow gallery owner, declared his support for the pair by saying he would launch his own “Forbidden Art” exhibition should the ruling be in favor of the church. One sympathizer stated for the Associated Press before the verdict was declared,

‘I am very afraid for them,’ she said. ‘The church is now younger, more energetic.’

Some fear a return to a cultural oppression similar to that of Czarist Russia. Some suspect the Kremlin may have had a role in lightening the punishment of the curators to prevent tarnishing their international image. Critics have predicted that people will be wary of displaying and producing potentially offensive art in Russia, and this will make Russian art less competitive globally.

MM/KN

Related Topics: Russian artists, curators, venues – Moscow

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Two contemporary art museums planned for Moscow

RUSSIAN ART MUSEUMS

Two new contemporary art museums are planned for Moscow reports Artinfo.

National Centre for Contemporary Art

Facade of National Centre for Contemporary Art

Mikhail Mindlin and Leonid Bazhanov, directors of the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, initiated the plan to establish a new contemporary art museum in the region. The $100 million proposal, although not government-funded, is approved by the Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev.

Mindlin and Bazhanov face two options: “either wait until the crisis is over or form a partnership with gallerists and local businessmen who show an interest in contemporary art.”

On July 24, the Ministry of Culture invited a number of gallerists and businessmen to its private session.

According to ARTINFO, attendees included:

Gary Tatintsian, owner of Tatintsian Gallery (which recently sold a small Jake and Dinos Chapman sculpture to the center at a discounted price after no one stepped up to buy it following its debut at a group show there four years ago), and Alexey Tsarevsky, head of Horizont Finance Company. Horizont is owned by Valery Nosov, who also owns ArtMedia Group, a publishing house that puts out two art magazines — Art+Auction Russia (a publishing partner of ARTINFO sister publication Art+Auction) and Blacksquare — and an arts and culture Web site, openspace.ru. Tsarevsky promised help from Horizont, including “consulting with the center on the predevelopment level and financial administration of the project.

The goal is to complete the project by 2015.

While in the process of developing a new museum, Mindlin and Bazhanov hope to expand their current museum too:

The two, who would lead the new institution, plan to expand the center’s current home to include 25,000 additional square meters (269,100 square feet) of new exhibition space, as well as a café, storage facilities, and a cinema, among other amenities. Essentially, the center would transition from a small, state-funded institution to a large and complex one, with the new museum inheriting its management and resources.

Their plan is not exactly new. The center already expanded once, in 2004, adding a three-story building as part of a larger redevelopment plan that would have included a large hotel and financed the center’s activities with money from developers. The current proposal adapts the earlier plan to the realities of the current economic situation. For example, with most of Moscow’s building projects on hold, no commercial spaces are planned to accompany the future museum, and it’s unclear if the new project will be subject to an architectural competition.

Stella Art Foundation

That Obscure Object of Art. Collections of Stella Art Foundation. Displayed at the Venice Biennale.

In tandem, Stella and Igor Kesaev, respectively the director and the funder of the Stella Art Foundation, have recently purchased a Constructivist garage in the centre of Moscow for a planned museum to house their foundation’s collections.

The couple showed their private collection of postwar art in Vienna a year ago, and the foundation financed an Ilya and Emilia Kabakov exhibition at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum(www.hermitagemuseum.org) in 2005, as well as Culture Minister Alexander Avdeev’s trip to the Venice Biennale for the opening of the Russian Pavilion this year.

Despite the state’s inability and reluctance to provide financial aid, the Ministry of Culture may still provide funds by drawing on Russian businesses.

Russian oligarchs invest in art to rehabilitate their image with the Kremlin, buying works abroad and bringing them (or “returning” them, in patriotic terms) to Russia.

Read full article at ARTINFO

Contributed by Wendy Ma

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Russian art fair Art Moscow delayed by recession

ART FAIR RUSSIA

According to a Bloomberg report by John Varoli, one of Russia’s biggest contemporary art fairs Art Moscow has been postponed from May 14th until September 2009

 to tap a crowd headed for a larger exhibition, as falling oil prices and squeezed credit quell art purchases among the nation’s rich. The 13th Annual Art Moscow will now be timed to coincide with the state-run Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, which starts Sept. 24, said organizer Expo Park Exhibition Projects Ltd.

“By September, everyone will have gotten used to the new reality of the crisis,” said Vasily Bychkov, Expo Park’s general director. “Foreign galleries will be more willing to come to Art Moscow when they know it coincides with the Biennale, which attracts leading international curators and collectors.”

Bloomberg for more

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Russian billionaire collector Mikhelson continues support for art despite downturn – Bloomberg

RUSSIAN ART COLLECTOR

Varoli reports on Bloomberg that Leonid Mikhelson is sponsoring a display of 30 works by 20th-century Russian master artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, many of which are well known to the public.

Billionaire Leonid Mikhelson’s company OAO Novatek is sponsoring Russia’s first exhibition of a state museum’s works by a private gallery, with a display of 30 masterpieces by the 20th-century master Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.

Russia’s second-biggest gas producer is making history 534 miles southeast of Moscow at the Victoria Gallery in the Volga city of Samara. Patronage is aiding Russian culture despite the decline in economic growth, stocks and the ruble.

Some of the paintings, known to many Russians since childhood, show a Bolshevik leader dying on the battlefield and a peasant riding a red horse which sails off into the sky.

“Novatek doesn’t abandon friends in hard times,” Vladimir Smirnov, Novatek’s vice-chairman, said in an interview. “We will continue to finance exhibitions at leading Russian museums.” The pieces are on loan from St. Petersburg’s State Russian Museum.

Novatek’s  is also financing the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in June 2009.

The company is the main sponsor and has pledged 300,000 euros ($385,700). Mastercard Worldwide is another leading sponsor of the pavilion, while the Russian government pays about 10 percent of the costs.

“Without Novatek’s support, it wouldn’t have been possible to pull this off,” said Olga Sviblova, chairwoman of the Russian Pavilion. “Most Russian companies prefer to support classical art, not contemporary art.”

About Mikhelson:

Novatek Chief Executive Officer Mikhelson is a collector of Russian fine art. While he declined to comment about his collection, art dealers say he prefers 19th-century and early 20th-century Russian art.

Born in a town on the Caspian Sea in Russia’s republic of Dagestan, Mikhelson graduated in 1977 from Samara’s Civil Engineering Institute. Before helping to create Novatek in 1994, he spent most of his career building gas pipelines.

In April 2008, Forbes estimated Mikhelson’s fortune at $5.9 billion, and ranked him as Russia’s 27th richest person.

Source: Bloomberg

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Kandinsky prize winner Russian artist Alexey Beliavev-Guintovt prices boosted by continuing controversy

Beliayev-Guintovt Star

 

RUSSIAN ART PRIZE

The Art Newspaper reports that Kandinsky Prize prize winner Alexey Beliavev-Guintovt continues to cause controversy and threatens a split amongst the supporters of the Russian contemporary art scene.

“These (art) unprecedented divisions in a community which hitherto has been more-or-less united to promote contemporary art in and outside Russia,” said Matthew Bown, a Russian art dealer based in London.

Artist accused of being fascist, jury member disavows vote

The debacle began on the night of the award ceremony when 2007 winner Anatoli Osmolovsky

stood up and lambasted Beliayev-Guintovt when he was announced the winner. In the days and weeks that followed, prominent dealers, critics and curators readily gave interviews accusing the artist of being a “fascist” and “ultra-nationalist” for his views, and his art style that harks back to Stalinist-era aesthetics.

Friedhelm Hutte, a jury member and representative of Deutsche Bank, the prize’s co-sponsor, retracted his vote for Beliayev-Guintovt in an interview with the German website, Taz.de.

Beliayev-Guintovt prices boosted by controversy

Whatever the state of the argument, and despite the economic downturn, the Kandinsky Prize and all the surrounding controversy have done the winner no harm at all. Triumph Gallery reports that prices of Beliayev-Guintovt’s works are up by 30%.

Source: The Art Newspaper

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Kandinsky prize won by Russian artist Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt, video of menacing ceremony

Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt

 

 

 

 

RUSSIAN ART PRIZE

Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt won Russia’s top contemporary-art award, the Kandinsky Prize, with a series of nationalist paintings “Motherland-Daughter,” winning 40,000 euros ($52,500).

The prize, in its second year and named after Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, aims to raise the profile of new art in Russia. It is sponsored by Art Chronika Foundation, Deutsche Bank AG and the Moscow-based holding company, IFD Kapital.

Beliayev-Guintovt beat two other finalists for Best Project. Boris Orlov’s “Parade of Astral Bodies,” is an installation of flying objects that mutate into Russian Imperial eagles. Dmitri Gutov’s “Used. Bicycle,” features an old bicycle and Soviet radio welded onto a metal frame.

Alexander Yakut

Beliayev-Guintovt was discovered and nurtured in the 1990s by Moscow artist and gallery owner, Alexander Yakut. Earlier this year, Yakut’s gallery merged with Triumph, which has since invested heavily in him, holding an exhibition of the “Motherland-Daughter” series earlier this year.

In an interview before the ceremony, Beliayev-Guintovt says he supports Eurasian movements, which calls on Russia to ally itself with Asian countries, and oppose Western ideas and influence.

Other winners at the ceremony included Diana Machulina, who won Best Young Artist for “Trud, painting,” inspired by a news photo of a 1985 Communist Party congress; she beat other finalists, Anya Zhelud, and Grigory Yushchenko.

Menace at ceremony

Bloomberg  gives an amusing if frightening account of the award ceremony replete with rivalry, jeering and right wing militant masked men.

The three young men of PG Group who won Best Media Art Project  for “Mounting Mobile Agitation” about the images in the mind of a Russian teenager, came on stage wearing ski masks, announcing themselves to be the Moscow representatives of Somali pirates.

“The future belongs to people in masks,” one member of the group said, to a stunned audience. “Your fat-cat lifestyle will soon end and then you’ll all be hung up high.”

“We’re not joking,” he added.

Silence descended on the room, followed by meek applause.

You can see for yourself by taking a look at the video clip of the masked men in action here and more coverage from Reuters Russian art prize winner heckled for nationalism.

Related topics:  art prize winners, reports from Russia, posts about Russian art, emerging artists

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Chinese performance, installation artist Zhang Huan’s first show in Moscow – Moscow Times

CHINESE ART SHOW RUSSIA

Zhang Huan Paintings and Sculptures to January 17 2009 Diehl and Gallery One

German gallery owner Volker Diehl has brought one of China’s leading artists to Moscow for his first personal exhibition. Zhang Huan who was recently signed by impresario dealer Jay Jopling of London’s White Cube has exhibited at major international museums including New York’s MOMA and Paris’ Pompidou Center.Even before the surge in interest in his work this decade, Zhang was difficult not to notice, reports the Moscow Times.

Physically demanding performance art

He first rose to notoriety in the early 1990s as part of the avant-garde Beijing East Village group, staging intensely physical performances that featured him sitting in a public toilet, covered in fish oil and honey, inviting flies to nestle on him.

Move from performance art to traditional media

Recently, however, he has turned towards the more traditional media of drawing, painting and sculpture that are exhibited here. “Performance art is very tiring. It makes me lose good ideas. So I stopped,” he said at his Asia Society exhibition in New York last year. “If I have good ideas, then I’ll return to performance art.”

Return to China and Chinese references

This change in approach also owes much to his return to China from New York in 2006, which saw Zhang re-embrace traditional Chinese motifs in his artwork. His approach to them, though, is new, distinctive and very striking, thanks less to drastic thematic reinterpretations than to his idiosyncratic use of material.

But as a whole, the effect they produce is distinctly Chinese. “I use ash to express and combine all the dreams, aspirations, all the spiritual longings, all the ideas that people have somehow infused into incense ash,” he wrote in an essay for Pace Wildenstein Gallery this year. “It’s the collective spirit and collective thinking and collective wishes of the people in China.”

New pieces from incense ash

Many of his new pieces are made out of incense ash from Buddhist monasteries, which in form can bring famous Western artists to mind — the disfigured sculpture “Ash Head No. 16” is reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti; “Big Ash Painting” bears the influence of abstract expressionism; and “Military Training on the Sea No. 2” even hints at William Turner’s seascapes.

Zhang’s non-burnt new works attempt to reincarnate that same ancient Chinese mentality. The balcony hosts a series of folkloric woodcuts and drawings in ink and soy sauce, some themes from which are metamorphosed into physically striking art objects. Downstairs, a feathered resin donkey climbs a massive wooden log up the western wall, opposite an imposing likeness of the Buddha made out of a cow skin.

Moscow Times for more

See:

Latest events on now, events coming, posts on Chinese artists, reports from Russia, installation art stories, art about human body, stories referencing Zhang Huan

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Dasha Zhukova experiments with exhibition of 12 leading video artists on giant outdoor screen – Moscow Times, Reuters

 

 OUTSIDE VIDEO ART RUSSIA

Daria Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow is closed for renovations until February 2009  when it will reopen with Christie’s owner Francois Pinault’s exhibition of his personal collection. In the meantime Zhukova is showing an exhibiton of 12 video art on outdoor jumbotron screens  (normally used for advertisements) in Moscow.

“Fashion designer and It-Girl Dasha Zhukova’s nonprofit Garage Center for Contemporary Culture has rarely been out of the art-world spotlight since it opened this September. Now, her exhibition space in the former bus depot is making an open-air assault on Moscow’s public with a monthlong exhibition of video art on a giant screen over the Mosenergo power plant. 

The clips that make up “Moscow on the MOVE,” which began showing last Saturday, were handpicked by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, co-director of exhibitions and programs at London’s trendy Serpentine Gallery. Videos by twelve artists and filmmakers from around the world will be shown in groups for a week each and then replaced by new 50-minute segments.

The project, based on a similar Olbrist venture in Seoul in 2000, is conceived not as a film to be screened but as a part of the city itself. “During my first visit, I was struck by the city’s Jumbotrons,” Olbrist wrote in a statement. “Millions of people see them every day. It’s like something out of Blade Runner — facades of buildings interwoven with giant billboards of moving images.”

For this new-media venture, Olbrist has selected a who’s who of contemporary video artists. Among the 12 participants are 1996 Turner Prize laureate Douglas Gordon, last year’s Russian representatives at the Venice Biennale the AES+F group and multimedia guru Doug Aitken, who carried off the Golden Lion, one of art’s highest accolades, from the 1999 Biennale. The form’s precursors are also represented, by Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic “Man with a Movie Camera,” Soviet documentary-maker Artavazd Peleshyan and German new wave legend Alexander Kluge.

Zhukova described the project as an “experiment — an unusual example of contemporary art leaving the confines of traditional museums or exhibition spaces.” Apart from the Russian Museum’s “Art Tour,” in which masterpieces from the collection were literally hung up on the street, and the now-defunct “Empty” video festival on Tverskoi Bulvar, there has indeed been little in the way of “outside art” in the city. “It’s a way of bringing art to everyone,” she added.

Moscow  Times 

“This is the first of its kind for Moscow, this is the
first time that we have a video art project in the middle of the city, in the
open air, so that’s new and exciting, I think there are some artists that
we’ve included in our line-up who haven’t done anything formally in Russia so
that’s also definitely something people will be excited to see,” said
Dasha.

Reuters

See:

• Youtube video clip AES+F Last Riot

 

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