Ars longa, vita brevis
Live! sti Thessaloniki, 13.09.2009
After the Viennese Kunsthistorisches Museum and the 53rd
Venice Biennale, works from the collection of the Stella Art Foundation will be
on show under the general title Moscow-Thessaloniki-2009
at Thessaloniki Cultural Center of the National Bank's Educational Foundation
(108 Vasilissis Olgas Str.) in the context of the parallel program of the
Second Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennale.
Stella Art Foundation is a non-commercial
organization created in November 2004 at the initiative of Stella Kesaeva. Main
purposes of the Foundation include supporting cultural exchanges, promotion of
Russian artists and institution of a contemporary art museum in Moscow. The
Foundation takes a very dynamic part in all the major international
contemporary art events (documenta, Venice Biennale) and cooperates with
important museum institutions of different countries (Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice). It is also implementing an extensive charity program.
Subjective Visions is just one
version in a cycle of independent exhibitions of works from the collection of
the Stella Art Foundation, which was launched in October 2008 at the Viennese
Kunsthistorisches Museum under the title That
Obscure Object of Art, and continued – with another version – at the
Venetian Ca' Rezzonico in the context of the parallel program of the Biennale
of this Italian city.
One common point of all the exhibitions is that all the works presented
at them belong to the collection of the Stella Art Foundation. The exhibition
at the National Bank's Educational Foundation (MIET) was curated by Thalea
Stefanidou, who notes in her essay prepared for the catalogue issued specially
on that occasion: "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 features works by the following artists: Nikita Alexeyev,
Yuri Avvakumov, Vagrich Bakhchanian, Olga Chernysheva, Michael Craig-Martin,
Eugenia Yemets, Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich, Alexandra Galkina, Alexander
Glinitsky, Dmitry Gutov, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Alex Kats, Maria
Konstantinova, Joseph Kosuth, Oleg Kulik, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andrei
Monastyrsky, Ilya Trushevsky, Stas Polnarev, Dmitry Tsvetkov, Spencer Tunick.
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