In the summer and autumn 2008, Stella Art Foundation (Moscow) will host a Contemporary Russian Art Festival on Corfu in collaboration with the Marina Noel Foundation (Corfu) together with Moscow Government and Kerkyra City Hall. The Festival, curated by Anastasia Dokuchaeva art-director of Stella Art Foundation, will feature a number of exhibitions and events showcasing the works now considered to be classical representations of the modern Russian art, as well as the most recent sensations in the realm of the young Russian art.
The Festival will start with a ceremonial opening of the 108 exhibition project by Evgenia Emets, which is already well-known both in Russia and across Europe, in the halls of the Corfu Oriental Art Museum. This photographic exhibition is based on material collected during the artist’s trip to Tibet. However, the beauty of the pictures brought to a precision of mathematical formula and always organized in pairs much like the primary elements, refers much less to any particular place on Earth, than to the eternal questions common to all the mankind — the issues of the absolute presence (one), absolute absence (zero) and eternity (eight).
Next event of the Festival will be Stas Polnarev’s exhibition entitled “Anna’s Album”. This young photographic artist has already attracted a lot of public interest with his first substantial project “Ruin Russia”, with which he participated in the official part of the 52nd Venice Biennale. “Anna’s Album” was created during the filming of the screen version of “Anna Karenina”, and may be described as a complex alloy of the artist’s impressions of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, its numerous stage and movie interpretations, and the vague “memories” of the novel’s main character.
“Paper Architecture”, one of the most striking artistic manifestations of Russian conceptualism, will be displayed during the last cycle of the show’s exhibition programme. Graphic work by a whole group of outstanding architects, brought together in a single project Transit. Sketch Book created by the “paper architecture” classic Yuri Avvakumov is a vivid proof of the artist’s internal freedom even in an unfree country, such as the USSR was at the time this graphic work was created. This is not only true of the masterly combination of different kinds of art, from architecture to poetry, that one finds on these sheets, but also of the artist’s rare gift of prediction of the future paths of evolution of art and the global architecture (which have been proven many times since) which is reflected on them.
Artists from Russia and Austria will hold a series of master classes at the house once occupied by the family of the famous writer Gerald Durrell in Kalami as part of a special “art probation” programme coordinated by the Vienna University of Applied Arts. In this way, Russian contemporary art will be represented in all its phases: things that already happened, are happening right now and are about to happen.
Exhibitions run from July 13 till August 6.
