The Russian Pavilion at the 56Th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale Di Venezia
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The Russian Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia May 9–November 22, 2015 Giardini, Venice The Green Pavilion Artist: Irina Nakhova Curator: Margarita Tupitsyn Commissioner: Stella Kesaeva Organizers: The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Stella Art Foundation, Moscow www.ruspavilion.ru The Russian Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia will present Irina Nakhova’s The Green Pavilion. Since the mid-1970s, Nakhova (b. 1955) has made a significant contribution to the development of Moscow Conceptualism, infusing its logocentric model with visual intensity and a critical edge. In the early 1980s, using one of the rooms in her Moscow apartment, Nakhova embarked on a series of environments entitled “Rooms.” The series anticipated Ilya Kabakov’s iconic Moscow installation The Man Who Flew into the Cosmos from His Room, which he later dubbed a “total installation.” Both artists made the step into three-dimensional space as a revolt against the stagnating conditions of the production and reception of Moscow vanguard art in the pre-perestroika era. Together with the Russian Pavilion curator, Margarita Tupitsyn, an internationally renowned expert on the Russian avant-garde and contemporary art, Nakhova has here realized a series of ambitious environments that revisit the paradigms of the Russian avant-garde, as well as explore and redefine Nakhova’s concepts of spatial relations and viewer interaction. This year, the Russian Pavilion is painted green, a color deliberately chosen to evoke the original appearance of the building, designed by Aleksei Shchusev in 1914. With the pavilion, Shchusev created a building uniquely suited to accommodate and enhance various artistic practices. Nakhova’s project deliberately fuses the functionality of Shchusev’s structure with her own use of the latest technologies. According to Tupitsyn, the Green Pavilion should also be seen as engaged in a dialogue with Kabakov’s Red Pavilion, executed for the 45th Venice Biennale, of 1993. With The Red Pavilion, Kabakov demonstrated the importance of color discourse for both Russian modernist and postmodernist artists, who shifted the approach to color from one of formalism to “socio- formalism.” Kabakov erected the Red Pavilion on the building’s grounds, leaving the pavilion itself empty—a potent metaphor that embodied the non-institutional status of vanguard artists and their non-participation in the Soviet culture industry. While Kabakov’s Red Pavilion marked the end of the Moscow vanguard’s hermetic phase, Nakhova’s Green Pavilion resumes the debate concerning these artists’ departure from local contexts in favor of more global significance in the post-Soviet era. Inside the Green Pavilion, Nakhova further underscores the signifying mechanisms of color by painting every room a different hue. Shchusev’s division of the Russian Pavilion into five discrete spaces prompted Nakhova to revisit her 1980s Rooms series, where the viewer was actively involved in an artistic experiment. In the first room on the pavilion’s main floor, Nakhova projects herself onto the futuristic image of a pilot in the form of a head. The oversized head’s impenetrability (achieved by means of a helmet, mask, and goggles), combined with the proposition that the viewer seek to control his perceptions, reveals the duality of the artist’s position in society. On the one hand, he is authoritative, while on the other he is too dependent on the external world from which he aims to escape and simultaneously wishes to control. In the second room of the installation, Nakhova tackles Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, the most enigmatic canvas in the history of modernism, a work entirely reliant on the viewer’s imagination as it provides neither formal nor iconographic referents. Depending on one’s position in Nakhova’s installation, the square appears opaque, creating the effect of a solar eclipse, or transparent, as if joined to the cosmos, observable through the skylight above. In the third space, Nakhova’s painterly gifts expand beyond the boundaries of the picture frame, filling up the entire space with an abstract composition executed in two of the most significant colors in the history of Russian art: revolutionary red and perestroika green. The characteristics of these two epochs of Russia’s history are thus communicated exclusively through the use of color and form, reminding the viewer of the social aspirations of abstract art. For the ground floor of the pavilion, Nakhova created a video installation consisting of the grids of digital re-creations of architectural modules drawn from Shchusev’s iconic monuments, such as the Lenin Mausoleum; these modules are filled with private and public archival photographs. Nakhova destabilizes this factographic architectonics by the insertion of images of abjection such as worms, and by a confluence of elements that together allegorize the vulnerability and instability of historical assertions. Catalogue An illustrated catalogue, edited by Margarita Tupitsyn, will be published to mark the opening of the exhibition. It includes an introduction by Stella Kesaeva, essays by Irina Nakhova and Margarita Tupitsyn, and considerations of Nakhova’s work by Moscow artists and critics such as Joseph Bakstein, Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Igor Makarevich, Andrei Monastyrsky, and Victor Tupitsyn. Russian Pavilion Press Center Anna Svergun +7 916 609 4115 [email protected] Natalya Vorobieva, Anton Mirimanov +7 905 544 1883 [email protected] The Artist Irina Nakhova Born in 1955 in Moscow. Graduated from the Graphic Design Faculty at the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy. Member of the Union of Artists since 1986. Irina Nakhova has taken part in major international art projects: “Iskunstvo: Moscow-Berlin-Stockholm” (West Berlin, 1988); “Adresse provisoire pour I'art contemporain russe” (Paris, 1993); “Laughter Ten Years After” (travelling exhibition at six museums and galleries in the U.S. and Canada, 1995); “Conceptualist Art: Points of Origin 1950s-80s” (Queens Museum, Queens, New York, 1999); “Berlin- Moscow / Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000” (Berlin, Moscow, 2003-2004); “Irina Nakhova and Pavel Pepperstein: Moscow Partisan Conceptualism” (London, 2010); «Post Pop: East Meets West» (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2014) and many others. Artist’s project “Rooms” takes place in Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2011, her installation “Renovation” in Stella Art Foundation in 2012. Irina Nakhova is Kandinsky Prize winner in 2013 (“Project of the Year” nomination). She is a Kandinsky Prize Winner in the category “Project of the Year” (2013). Irina Nakhova lives and works in Moscow (Russia) and New Jersey (United States). Margarita Tupitsyn Margarita Tupitsyn is an independent curator, scholar, and critic living in New York and Paris. In 1981–83, she was the curator of the Contemporary Russian Art Center of America in SoHo, New York, where she organized the first exhibitions of Moscow Conceptualism in the United States, including Russian New Wave (1981) and Apt Art: Moscow Vanguard in the ’80s (1984). In 1986, Tupitsyn curated Sots Art for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and during the perestroika years she curated or co-curated Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (ICA, Boston, 1990); The Green Show (Exit Art, New York, 1990); The Work of Art in the Age of Perestroika (Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, 1990); and The Great Utopia (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992). In 1999, she was responsible for the Russian section of Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Queens Museum, New York), and, most recently, she organized Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism (Tate Modern, London, 2009). Tupitsyn is the author of Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present (1989); El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet (1999); Malevich and Film (2002); and Against Kandinsky (2006). Her articles have appeared in numerous international publications, among them Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artforum, and Flash Art. In 2011, Tupitsyn received a Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to support her forthcoming book, Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–92. Stella Kesaeva Stella Kesaeva is the President of the Stella Art Foundation and the Commissioner of the Russian Pavilion at the Art Biennale 2015, a position she also held for the Art Biennale’s editions of 2011 and 2013. Since the Stella Art Foundation was established in 2003, Kesaeva has organized approximately one hundred exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and the United States. These include Ruin Russia (Scuola dell’arte dei Tiraoro e Battioro, 2007) and That Obscure Object of Art (Ca’ Rezzonico, 2009), both organized in conjunction with the Venice Biennales of those years. She has also partnered with major museums, including the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where she presented a trio of exhibitions: That Obscure Object of Art (2009), Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich’s show In Situ (2009), and Boris Orlov’s Circle of Heroes (2010). Among Kesaeva’s exhibition projects in Russia are Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s “Incident in the Museum” and Other Installations (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, 2004); Mapplethorpe’s Rooms (Stella Art Space, Moscow, 2005); and Vadim Zakharov: 25 Years on One Page (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2006). Kesaeva also works closely with the musical director and conductor Valery Gergiev. In 2008, she worked with Gergiev on organizing the Russian premiere of Bill Viola’s production of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Stella Art Foundation The Stella Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization established in Moscow in November 2003 on the initiative of Stella Kesaeva. The foundation is dedicated to supporting contemporary art, with a special focus on encouraging scholarship in the field of Moscow conceptual art. It maintains a collection of over one thousand artworks from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Stella Art Foundation has carried out approximately one hundred projects by Russian and foreign artists both in Russia and abroad.