Museum of Moscow
While the world calculates its Venice schedule, Moscow has taken this week to make a few major announcements regarding its museums, including the iconic Museum of Moscow.
First, following the success of last week’s Night at the Museum program, Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky has declared that he would like to see this event – which keeps museums up late, mixing curators and cocktails in a bid for a younger, livelier audience – four times a year instead of once, so that each season would have its own version. According to Artguide, Medinsky was quoted as saying, “It doesn’t cost us much,” which leads us to believe no one has shown him the PR budget. (Case in point? See the advertisement below, which is all kinds of Francis Alys meets Harvey, though it’s actually a monster borrowed from Philippe Parreno’s Invisibleboy (2010.) The creepy, slinky art-rabbits reappear all over the site as well, where they ride motorbikes, march with banners, and sit in deep contemplation.)
Also, not far on the heels of word that Pushkin Museum director Irina Antonova had been promoted to curator of exhibitions for Moscow Museums (and her immediate attempt to pry some of the Hermitage’s most prized possessions away from the rival museum, in the name of reviving the short-lived Museum of New Western Art), Alina Saprykina has been tapped as the new director of the Moscow Museum, a set of historical museums and institutions centered in the Museum of History of Moscow, one of the city’s oldest institutions, having been founded in 1986.
Zurab Tsereteli, Artplay director Alina Saprykina, and NCCA director Mikhail Mindlin
Saprykina built a reputation working on the launch of the Garage Center of Contemporary Culture and later as the director of Artplay, the sprawling industrial complex home to the 4th Moscow Biennale. This weekend Artplay will also host the first-ever “Art Space Event“; yes, the name needs a little work, but the program itself acts as a mini-fair, with galleries like Triumph, Iragui, Gridchinhall and Pop/off/art (all Moscow) and Anna Nova, Dmitry Semenova and AL Gallery (all Petersburg) contributing projects. For more on the event and its participants, check the site, which is available in English and Russian.
We’ll keep you posted on other updates, but in the meantime, we’d like to thank Artguide, for keeping us informed!
Baibakov Art Projects 