Moscow-Thessaloniki 2009 // Eleftheri Ora, 11.08.2009

Moscow-Thessaloniki 2009
Eleftheri Ora, 11.08.2009

After the Viennese Kunsthistorisches Museum and the 53rd Venice Biennale, works from the collection of Stella Art Foundation will be presented in Thessaloniki from September 19 till November 1, in the context of the Second Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennale under the general title Moscow - Thessaloniki 2009.

The core exhibition of the Moscow - Thessaloniki 2009 program is conducted under the title Subjective Visions / Works from the collection of Stella Art Foundation and will be on view at the Thessaloniki Cultural Center of the National Bank's Educational Foundation in the context of the parallel program of the Second Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennale.

Stella Art Foundation is a non-commercial institution established in November 2004 at the initiative of Stella Kesaeva. Key objectives of the Foundation are to facilitate cultural exchanges, promote the work of Russian artists and establish a contemporary art museum in Moscow. The Foundation has most active presence in all the major international contemporary art events (documenta, Venice Biennale) and cooperates with the most significant museums worldwide (Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Ca' Rezzonico in Venice). It is simultaneously implementing an extensive charity program. The Subjective Visions exhibition is just one version in a whole cycle of independent shows of works Stella Art Foundation's collection that started in October 2008 with an exhibition at the Viennese Kunsthistorisches Museum under the title That Obscure Object of Art and was continued this year with its "other version" at the Venetian Ca' Rezzonico in the context of of the parallel program of the Venice Biennale. One common moment uniting all these exhibitions is that all the works presented in them belong to the collection of Stella Art Foundation.

Thalea Stefanidou, curator of the exhibition to be held at the National Bank's Educational Foundation, observes in her essay written the for a catalogue specially dedicated to the exhibition: "a collection accumulates fragments of creative time, creating documentations of the past for the future, while curating plays with the poetic quality of both the ephemeral and the accidental, and thus brings the collection to life in the present, inducing the spectator-accomplice." [...] Three fields of activity and reflection: creating, collecting and curating, treated as three equally self-directed processes that permeate each other in order to depict renewed memory corrugations, so that the collection becomes an occasion to create biographèmes, of the artist, the collector, the curator. This is a way to construct identities, or even better, one identity of plural self. [.. .] How is an art work structured? How is a collection ‘built’? How is the content of a collection restructured in relation to new spaces of its reception and the curatorial task? All these are questions that in order to be answered lead to the three-sectioned, organizational mechanism, which is based on a self that decides and that creates an organic system, a whole, a whole every time different."

The exhibition will feature works of the following artists: Nikita Alexeyev, Yuri Avvakumov, Vagrich Bakhchanian, Olga Chernysheva, Michael Craig-Martin, Eugenia Yemets, Elena Yelagina and Igor Makarevich, Alexandra Galkina, Alexander Glinitsky, Dmitry Gutov, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Alex Katz, Maria Konstantinova, Joseph Kosuth, Oleg Kulik, Robert Mappelthorpe, Andrei Monastyrsky, Ilya Trushevsky, Stas Polnarev, Dmitry Tsvetkov, Spencer Tunick.