On June 29th, Stella Kesaeva was appointed commissioner of the Russian Pavilion at the 2011, 2013, and 2015 Venice Biennales by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. Stella Art Foundation will bear responsibility for organizing exhibitions in the national pavilion.
Stella Art Foundation is proud to announce the curator and artist to represent Russia at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The Russian Pavilion is to be curated by philosopher and art critic Boris Groys. Groys proposed the candidace of Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions for the Russian national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which the Foundation approved.
Russian Pavilion commissioner Stella Kesaeva made the following statement: “I am grateful to the Ministry of Culture for entrusting me with representing Russia at the most important forum in contemporary art. Making a decision about appointing the curator was simple given that, in my opinion, one of the curator’s primary tasks is to be accessible to both Russian and international audiences. I am convinced that Boris Groys, who has extensive experience working with Russian artists in the West, is one of the most worthy candidates for the position.”
Boris Groys, curator of the Russian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, and Andrei Monastyrski have written texts, which are provided below, at the request of Stella Art Foundation.
A press conference and presentation of the project are to be held in Moscow in February or March 2011.
For me, the most interesting thing about Andrei Monastyrski is his lifelong fidelity to his artistic practice.
He began working in the 1970s (still in the Soviet Union) and has continued to do so exclusively along the inner logic of his artistic venture in the era following the end of Soviet power. Today, he declines to accommodate his art to market demand, just as he once declined to accommodate it to ideological censorship.
At the same time, Monastyrski is in no way a shut-in, willfully isolated from social life. Quite the contrary — the Collective Actions group, founded by Monastyrski in the 1970s, was the first instance in Russia of the kind of participatory art, now fashionable the world over, that removes the viewer from his usual passive condition and gives him an active role in the creation of an artistic event.
There is one more way in which Monastyrski is a contemporary artist in the fullest sense of the word, specifically, that he does not restrict himself to any specific method or genre. Monastyrski’s artistic statements make equal use of performance, poetry, essay-writing, photography, video, objects, and installations. And it is that same artistic transmediality that makes Monastyrski’s works steadfastly contemporary; methods and techniques can get old, but a clearly defined artistic statement is timeless.
Boris Groys, September 2010
Collective Actions (Andrei Monastyrski, Nikolai Pantikov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Sergey Romashko, and Sabina Hensgen; Nikita Alexeev and Georgy Kizevalter left in 1983) began its work in 1976 and has continued it to the present day.
We have realized 124 actions and collected 10 volumes (work on the 11th is underway) of the Trips to the Countryside books, which are comprised of texts describing the actions, accounts by the actions’ participants, and theoretical articles about the contemporary aesthetic the group continues to develop. Each volume also features photographs and various documentary materials from the actions (maps, supplementary material, drawings, and so on).
In 1977, the second year of the group’s work, Flash Art International, the leading art magazine of the time, published a feature about CA’s actions and ran a photograph of one action on the cover. That same year, documentation of CA was presented at the Venice Biennale.
CA’s work in the 1970s and 1980s was acclaimed in both Russian conceptualist circles and the West as work at the forefront of the discourse of contemporary art as art “after philosophy.” Practically every Moscow artist, poet, writer, critic, and musician from the 1970s and 1980s — themselves part of an international-level (as opposed to regional) contemporary artistic avant-garde — took part in the group’s work as spectators and, even in a certain sense, collaborators.
As aesthetic space-time events, CA’s actions have unfolded in both huge rural spaces (fields, forests, rivers, and so on) and in the considerable discourse of texts introducing, accompanying, and commenting on action events (i. e. in the Trips to the Countryside books). However, actions have sometimes been held in both urban and closed space when this was called for by the process of developing a contemporary aesthetic language, social particularities in terms of historical development “here and now,” or the various twists and turns of the collective existential discourse of emerging stages of an aesthetic era.
Andrei Monastyrski, September 2010
Photo: Natalia Nikitina
