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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
candidacy of Andrei Monastyrsky 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 Monastyrsky 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 further press information please contact
Anna Svergun, Valeria Afanasieva,
Natalia Grabar, tel.: +
7(495)6979530, 89055441883, a.svergun@gmail.com,
artpr@svergun.ru
"For me, the most interesting thing about Andrei Monastyrsky
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, Monastyrsky is in no way a
shut-in, willfully isolated from social life. Quite
the contrary—the Collective Actions group, founded by Monastyrsky
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 Monastyrsky is a
contemporary artist in the fullest sense of the word, specifically, that he
does not restrict himself to any specific method or genre. Monastyrsky'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 Monastyrsky'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 Monastyrsky, Nikolai Pantikov, Igor Makarevich,
Elena Elagina, Sergei 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 out of Town 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 out of Town 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 Monastyrsky,
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