Peter Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke
The Golden Age of the Russian Avant-Garde
15 April–26 May 2014
Opening: 14 April
Central Exhibition Hall Manege
Manezhnaya Square 1
Moscow
Russia
Curators: Olga Shishko, Elena Rumyantseva
According to Peter Greenaway, “what we do is in tune with our times, and of course, this approach is not in any way to detract from the merits of the works kept in the museum. But we do not leave them to gather dust there, we take them with us to the present and to the future.”
The Golden Age of the Russian Avant-Garde is a large-scale exhibition project specially created by Peter Greenaway (Britain) and Saskia Boddeke (Netherlands) for the large exhibition hall of the Moscow exhibition complex Manege.
The exhibition will have its world premiere in Moscow in April and will become one of the key projects of the bilateral UK-Russia Year of Culture. It will allow a broad public to acquaint itself with the most important media art works of the 20th-century Russian avant-garde.
Peter Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke’s multimedia installation will animate more than 1,000 masterpieces of the Russian avant-garde. With the help of multimedia techniques, it will show rare Russian avant-garde pieces from the State Tretyakov Gallery, Russian Museum, A.A.Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Schusev State Museum of Architecture, St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki, Greece), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum of Modern Art ( New York), and Guggenheim Museum (New York), as well as from private collections. Black Square by Kazimir Malevich—perhaps the most famous work of the Russian avant-garde—will be taken as the basis and the central metaphor of the exposition.
The unique exhibition will be presented in 5,000 square meters of floor space. It will include polyscreen installations made with the aid of the most advanced projection, light and sound equipment. This new approach to the history of art creates a new visuality and new ways of knowing the world through images. The use of polyscreen as an artistic device allows new aspects of paintings or sculptures to be shown, while the synchronized images, bound together by a single idea, create a new architectonics, lending the museum exposition a further dimension.
Innovative multimedia technologies, including the combination of cinema and painting, animation and 3D, not only facilitate digital reproductions of the most brilliant works of the Russian avant-garde, but also immerse the viewer in the context of the epoch, creating the effect of an altered reality and revealing new meanings.
The exhibition is curated by Olga Shishko and Elena Rumyantseva. The Golden Age of the Russian Avant-Garde is a project within the framework of the bilateral UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014 and is supported by the British Council. It is organized by CEH Manege in collaboration with the MediaArtLab Centre for Art and Culture.
Parallel to the exhibition, Manege and MediaArtLab are launching an interdisciplinary project in April that includes exhibitions, performances and discussions by leading experts on the Russian avant-garde. The program “Projections of the Avant-Garde” consists of a range of diverse events, including mini-conferences, lectures, discussions, musical and theatrical performances, movie screenings and excursions. Scholars and critics will elaborate on how the ideas of the Russian avant-garde transformed the arts and opened up alternative possibilities for the creation and transmission of ideas. A century after the creation of the Black Suprematist Square, a landmark work for a number of avant-garde streams, the debate continues: What role does the legacy of the Russian avant-garde play in contemporary culture? “Projections of the Avant-Garde” will present a detailed story of the art of the early 20th century and demonstrate, from different points of view, the significance of the Russian avant-garde for today’s culture.
Press contact:
Julia Korotkova
korotkova [at] vconfession.com / T +7 (926) 821 40 55
Accreditation:
pr.manege [at] gmail.com / T +7 (495) 645 92 76
