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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Asians, women show momentum and banks tumble in Art Review’s Power 100 2008

INFLUENCERS ART

Art Review monthly magazine has published its Power 100 list for 2008.  Produced annually since 2001 it is a ranking of the most influential participants in the art world and includes artists, gallerists, auctioneers and collectors.

Trends this year include

• Higher rankings and numbers for women in a market tradtionally dominated by men – Kathy Halbreich is first woman to appear on her own in the top 10. Ranked third, behind Hirst and gallerist Larry Gagosian, she is the newly appointed Associate Director of MoMA, New York.
• Tumbling influence of banks  – as the global credit contagion spreads, financial institutions take a tumble  with both UBS and Deutsche Bank, longtime key art sponsors, ranked 62 and 63 respectively in 2007, falling off the Power 100 in 2008. 
• Asian participants showing momentum or appearing for the first time.

Takashi Murakami (28), a superbrand not dissimilar to Damien Hirst’s model comes in at 61 places above his 2007 ranking for a year that saw a major exhibition of his work, including a Louis Vuitton store selling Murakami’s own branded products, travel across the US and draw record numbers of museum goers.

Ongoing artistic and financial strength in emerging markets has seen new listings for collectors Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova (54) and a strong rise by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang (69, from 99 in 2006), with first-time appearances by the Beijing-based Long March Project (93) and Delhi-based gallerist Peter Nagy (95).

 

Asian artists

• Takashi Murakami no 28 (Japanese) wiki site
• Ai Weiwei no 47 (Chinese)
• Cai Guo Qiang 69 (Chinese) wiki
• Subodh Gupta 92 (Indian)  pics
• The Long March Project 93 (Chinese) pics  site

 

Collectors from Asia

• Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan no 30
• Roman Abromovich and Daria Zhukova no 54

Asia-based gallerists

• Peter Nagy Artkrush interview

Entrants are judged on the following four criteria, each of which carries a 25 percent weighting.

1. Influence on art development: entrants must exert influence over the type, style and shape of contemporary art being produced in the previous 12 months.

2. International influence: as the list is international, entrants must exert influence on a global scale rather than as big fish in small-to-medium ponds.

3. Financial clout: entrants are judged on the extent to which they have shaped, moulded or dominated the art market, whether as artists, dealers or collectors.

4. Activity within the last 12 months: entrants are judged on having actually done something during the period September 2007 to August 2008. It’s not enough to sit on your powerful behind.

Russian art collectors are changing their tastes – New York Times

 

Dasha Zhukova, the new art

RUSSIAN COLLECTORS

Until recently, market experts say, the Russians were primarily interested in the decorative arts. In 2004, for instance, the Russian billionaire Victor Vekselberg spent $100 million for the entire Forbes family Fabergé collection. Then about five years ago, some of those Russian collectors widened their sights to mostly Russian-born artists, like Chagall. Since then, the tide has turned, said Joachim Pissarro, a great-grandson of Camille Pissarro and an adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Now they’re going outside of Russia, buying artists like Jeff Koons,” he said. “The pendulum has swung 180 degrees, with Russians becoming one of the most powerful forces in the market.”

Many of the newly rich Russians, including Abramovich the oil tycoon and his girlfriend Zhukova, now make their homes in London. The Russians generally do not support British cultural institutions and seldom attend gallery openings or auction house parties, but Zhukova is different. She has agreed to be a co-host at the Serpentine Gallery’s fund-raiser next month, and she is keenly interested in meeting artists.

Zhukova who opens a 92,000 square foot contemporary art space this September acknowledges being a relative art neophyte. “I didn’t study art history and don’t remember names of artists,” she said. “But if I like an image, I remember it.” Overnight, Zhukova’s new center and her connections, including a billionaire art-collecting boyfriend, have made her an art-world It Girl. Her fame at the age of 27 attests to the seismic effect that Russian money – in some cases Ukrainian or Georgian money – is having.

Zhukova is the daughter of Alexander Zhukov, a deputy prime minister who made his fortune in oil. Roman Abramovich has riveted the art world recently by paying top dollar for works by Francis Bacon, Giacometti and others. (Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $23.5 billion this year, putting him among the world’s 50 wealthiest figures.) An oil tycoon turned investor who owns the Chelsea soccer team in Britain, the 41-year-old Abramovich is also a friend of the Kremlin. He recently stepped down as governor of Chukotka, an impoverished region in the Russian Far East that he successfully helped to revive through his vast wealth.

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Zhukova, girlfriend of Abramovich opens new 92,000 sf art space in Moscow 2008 – International Herald Tribune

Daha Zhukova, Abramovich

 

 

 

 

RUSSIA NEW CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE opens September 2008

Dasha Zhukova is to open a contemporary art space in the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, a giant red-brick Constructivist-era landmark near the Olympic Stadium in Moscow. Popular with architects the garage was designed in 1926 by Konstantin Melnikov.

“I thought Moscow should have a space like this for contemporary art,” Zhukova said. “There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.”

Under its new name the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture this 92,000 square foot space will open next month and its first show will be a retrospective of the artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

Zhukova herself acknowledges being a relative art neophyte. “I didn’t study art history and don’t remember names of artists,” she said. “But if I like an image, I remember it.”

Born in Moscow in 1981, Zhukova is an only child. Her parents divorced when she was young, and when her mother, a molecular biologist, took a job at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1990s, they moved there. Zhukova spoke not a word of English. But she quickly adjusted, she said, attending schools in Los Angeles and then the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A year ago few people in the art world had heard of her.

Zhukova said she isn’t modeling the Garage Center after any specific museum. “I’m taking different aspects of different institutions that are inspiring influences,” she said.

Besides aid from Abramovich, financing is also coming from other private sources and corporations. Admission will be free.

After the Kabakov exhibition that opens next month, the Garage Center plans to exhibit works from the collection of Christie’s owner, the luxury goods magnate François Pinault, whose foundation is based in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Dent-Brocklehurst said she was considering commissioning artists to create site-specific works for the space, analogous to installations in the vast Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

Asked if the Garage would have its own collection, Zhukova said that would be many years down the road, if ever.”For now I’m trying to learn as much as I can to make up for my lack of art history,” she said. “The more I read, the more I realize what I don’t know.”

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• International Herald Tribune story
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