Leonid Bazhanov, an artwork historian and curator who based the Nationwide Centre for Modern Arts (NCCA) in Moscow, died on 11 January, aged 79. His loss of life closes a promising however transient period in Russian modern tradition that grew out of the Soviet unofficial artwork motion however has been rapidly silenced beneath Vladimir Putin.
Bazhanov, who was additionally an artist, labored in state establishments together with the State Pushkin Museum of Positive Arts and the Kremlin Museums early in his profession, and within the Nineteen Nineties within the Ministry of Tradition. He got here into his personal as a curator of underground exhibitions within the Seventies and 80s, which gave beginning to the NCCA in 1992. It was given a state-owned house close to Moscow Zoo within the early 2000s.
As inventive director, Bazhanov expanded the NCCA right into a community of centres throughout the nation—probably the most spectacular being within the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, within the west. For a time he dreamed of constructing a Russian state-supported equal of the Centre Pompidou.
As freedom of expression was quashed the NCCA was transferred to direct authorities management. In 2016, the organisation was abruptly merged with Rosizo, the exhibitions arm of the tradition ministry, after which introduced beneath the Pushkin museum.
Bazhanov withdrew into instructing, overseeing the modern artwork programme on the Increased College of Economics (HSE) Artwork and Design College in Moscow, which has since intently aligned itself with the state.
After Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Bazhanov warned concerning the penalties for modern artwork. “The federal government won’t return to socialist realism however will create a simulacrum, imitating traits of leisure and the shopping center,” he mentioned in a narrative printed in New Traces Journal in 2023.
A bunch of pioneers
Bazhanov’s passing got here virtually precisely a yr after the back-to-back deaths in of Joseph Backstein, who was 78, and Lev Rubinstein, 76, in January 2024. They have been additionally key figures within the historical past of Russian modern artwork who put Moscow Conceptualism, which reacted in opposition to Soviet Socialist Realism, on the worldwide map and introduced a Western understanding of artwork to Russia.
Backstein, who died in London, labored as an engineer within the Soviet period and studied philosophy. He participated in dialogues with Conceptual artists Andrei Monastyrski and Ilya Kabakov. Throughout Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika—a interval of social and political reform that befell within the mid-Nineteen Eighties—he staged an artwork efficiency at Moscow’s Sanduny Bathhouse, and did so once more in 1992 on the infamous Butyrskaya jail. He later had a stint as a state cultural bureaucrat at Rosizo.
Backstein was additionally the founder and inventive director of the Moscow Biennale of Modern Artwork. The primary version, titled “Dialectics of Hope,” was held in 2005 within the former Lenin Museum on Pink Sq., signalling, it appeared on the time, a brand new chapter for the nation’s artwork scene. Worldwide artists corresponding to Christian Boltanski and Yoko Ono, and curators together with Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist, have been amongst these in attendance in Moscow. Backstein was additionally the founder and director of the Institute of Modern Artwork in Moscow, which was renamed after him in 2019. Lots of of younger artists have graduated from the college, lots of whom have needed to go away Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
Rubinstein died after being hit by a automobile whereas crossing a road in Moscow. He was a founding father of the Conceptualist motion and a poet, who created a style of “word card poems,” drawing from his work with card catalogues as a librarian. He was a bigger than life presence at Moscow artwork occasions.
“In a way, I’d say that Moscow Conceptualism is united by an interior feeling that the world is split, all of the texts are written, the photographs are painted,” he instructed Lechaim, {a magazine} targeted on Russian-Jewish tradition, in 2017. “The duty of at present’s artist is to rethink, to rename.”
Rubinstein lives on amongst mates and followers in a energetic, transferring Fb group known as “Lev Rubinstein is With Us.”
A symposium in January at Pushkin Home in London paid tribute to Backstein and addressed the way forward for modern artwork in Russia. Elena Zaytseva, a curator who organised the occasion, wrote on her Fb web page: “For us, the technology who got here of age in Russia after Perestroika, Joseph Backstein was one of many heroes who broke the membrane between Russian artwork and Europe.”
In one other submit, considered one of Backstein’s college students, artist Haim Sokol, responded to Bazhanov’s loss of life and famous the gaping gap left by the cumulative losses: “Folks with whom I had the great fortune to speak, work, dwell in the identical metropolis, on the identical time. Neither that metropolis, nor that point, nor these individuals exist anymore.”
Bazhanov, trying past the challenges of the present interval, instructed New Traces journal in 2023 that the self-reliant artwork communities seeded throughout Russia are creating “artwork which is stronger than barricades”. They’re, he mentioned, “the inexperienced shoots of a brand new Russian artwork.”
Discussion about this post