Moscow - Thessaloniki 2009 // Kerdos, 12.08.2009

Moscow-Thessaloniki 2009
Kerdos, 12.08.2009

After the exhibitions at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and at the 53rd Venice Biennale, artwork from the collection of the Stella Art Foundation will be presented in Thessaloniki, in the context of the Second Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennale, under the general title Moscow-Thessaloniki 2009 from August 18 to September 19.

The central exhibition program of the Moscow-Thessaloniki 2009 will be conducted 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.

The Subjective Visions exhibition is just one version in a whole cycle of independent shows of works from the collection of Stella Art Foundation 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 another version implemented at the Venetian Ca' Rezzonico in the context of the parallel program of the Venice Biennale. One common element of all these exhibitions is that all the works shown are part of the Stella Art Foundation's collection.

Thalea Stefanidou, who curated the exhibition at the National Bank's Educational Foundation, notes in her essay written for the 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 highlight works by 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.

The Subjective Visions project has been organized by Stella Art Foundation (Moscow) in cooperation with the National Bank's Educational Foundation and company artBox.gr | creative arts management, and sponsored by the Second Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennale.

The exhibition will be open during the following hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays: from 10:00 to 18:00, Fridays, from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 18:00 to 21:00. Attendance for the public will be free. Group visits should be arranged in advance with the National Bank's Educational Foundation at 2310 295.170-1.

National Bank's Educational Foundation/Thessaloniki Cultural Center (Vasilissis Olgas Str. 108).