Moscow exhibitions 2014
www.v-a-c.ru
V-A-C Foundation is a private institution founded in Moscow in 2009 and committed to supporting art made in Russia as well as the new generations of artists from around the world. Our focus is directed towards contemporary art and cultural practice with the aim of providing a platform for creativity in the wider sense of the word. We strive to be actively engaged in artistic production, rather than the patronage or sponsorship of ongoing artistic processes. The following exhibitions are part of our ongoing programme to introduce contemporary art to non-art spaces.
Michael Tolmachev
Beyond Visual Range
23 April–1 July 2014
Curated by Katerina Chuchalina
Central Armed Forces Museum of the Russian Federation
129110 Moscow, Soviet Army, 2
The exhibition project is the result of Michael Tolmachev’s studies in media arts at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, made possible through the Olga Lopukhova Grant programme established by V-A-C Foundation. The show, which will take place at the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow, sees the artist utilize the museum as his medium.
For the exhibition, Tolmachev has been granted access to the museum’s entire contents and archives and has therefore been able to examine the politics of the museum from the inside.
Tolmachev looks at the ways in which war is represented in the media, and in this case in a museum environment in particular. And, as suggested in the title of the show, Beyond Visual Range, digs deeper into the context behind museum content and he questions the role of the interpreter (the war photographer, the battlefield painter, the soldier). He also compares the responsible participation of someone looking down a gunsight with someone who might look at an image of war displayed in a museum.
Urban Fauna Lab collective
Bad Seed
20 June–22 August 2014
Curated by Katerina Chuchalina
No. 29 “Floriculture and gardening” Pavilion
All-Russian Exhibition Center
Mira Avenue 119, Building 29
Moscow
Urban Fauna Lab collective is a multidisciplinary platform conceived to explore parasitic and symbiotic relationships in urban environments. In this exhibition, the artists put forward a radical solution for urban greening by carpeting areas of land, derelict buildings and entire districts with weeds to form distinctive urban “parks.” In compliance with Aristotle’s spontaneous generation theory, the project leaders will conceive an expansive flora laboratory for a selection of plants from the dust of urban flora.
Chosen by V-A-C as the venue for the show, the No. 29 “Floriculture and gardening” Pavilion, situated in the All-Russian Exhibition Centre, normally occupied by small businesses, is a unique space located in a modernist building among the Stalinist baroque pavilions in Moscow and lost in the vastness of the ill-fated exhibition centre. For the exhibition, the artists will first ‘sanitise’ the entire pavilion and then use it for their botanical experiments.
Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks
7 July–22 August 2014
Curated by What, How and for Whom/WHW
The Institute for African Studies (IAS)
30/1, Spiridonovka str.
Moscow, 123001
Organised by Young Arab Theatre Fund/YATF
www.meetingpoints.org
The exhibition Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks is part of the seventh edition of Meeting Points, a multidisciplinary contemporary arts festival focusing on contextualized presentation of art from the Arab World. The title of the project is a quote from Wretched of the Earth (1961), the book revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote as a reflection on the Algerian revolution and whose title derives from the opening lyrics of the Internationale, the song of the world workers’ movement. A series of exhibitions held successively in Zagreb, Antwerp, Cairo, Hong Kong, Beirut, Vienna and Moscow between September 2013 and July 2014 forms a drifting, digressive narrative, each part complementing and possibly contradicting the others. Conceived as an exhibition in time, it resurfaces anew in each installment, realigning topics with particular locations and their specific geopolitical and historical contexts. In Moscow, the exhibition will take place in the Institute for African Studies and attempt to establish a dialogue with its past, present and future. The institute was established in 1959 and has continuously worked on research of independent African nations that emerged on the continent following the collapse of the colonial system.
