Stella Art Foundation presents an installation of works by students of the Base Institute, founded by Anatoly Osmolovsky. This project was first shown in the Moscow Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2012. The Pavilion show was entitled Haunted Moscow.
The installation consists of composite authorial objects, the “frame” for each of which is a suitcase — the tried and tested means of transporting things through space. This is at once the symbol of a journey (adequate to the project, which was created to be displayed in a distant place) and the sign for a microcosm, which is vested by default with the autonomy characteristic of any artefact that claims to be called a work of art. And, most importantly, a suitcase is the ideal form for a portable museum.
Anatoly Osmolovsky: “Eleven works by Base students are presented at the exhibition, the works being an exercise on the theme of a personal portable museum. As is known, Marcel Duchamp made a number of suitcase-boxes for his own mini-museum, where he put together his own most important art objects, reproduced in miniature form. A similar idea was proposed to the Base students. They had to develop the concept of such a museum and realize it in an effective and convincing manner.”
Each student dealt with the task of “packing his suitcase” in a highly individual way, so the viewer is presented with a range of thematic solutions: from the highly formal (placement of the sum of smaller suitcases in one large suitcase) and programmatic-alternative (substitution of the suitcase by a knotted handkerchief) to the socio-conceptual (a selection of reproductions of the most expensive works of art) and maniacal-lyrical (a collection of objects of a private “cult”). But most of the solutions turned out to be connected with artistic problems.
The whole collection of suitcase-museums, gathered into a single installation, can fairly be considered to be the work by Anatoly Osmolovksy. Osmolovsky is not only the Head of the Base Institute and teacher of the students, who made the works shown in this exhibition, but also one of the most remarkable contemporary Moscow artists. Having come to prominence at the turn of the 1980’s and 1990’s, and now considered a “classic of contemporary art”, Anatoly Osmolovsky has travelled a road from art-activism to affirmation of the autonomy of art, and has recently devoted himself to art education. All of these fields are equally important parts of his unified creative activity.
Artists: Leyli Aslanova, Ilmira Bolotyan, Leta Dobrovolskaya, Valentina Vassilyeva, Alexander Kolesnikov, Marina Korshok, Irina Petrakova, Alexander Plyusnin, Sonya Rumyantseva, Nikita Spiridonov, Timur Khakimov, and Anatoly Osmolovsky.
