In a gesture of high aesthetics, the National Bank’s Educational Foundation, and, in particular, its Thessaloniki Cultural Center, is holding a major exhibition of works from the collection of a dynamic Russian foundation — the Stella Art Foundation — entitled Subjective Visions. The exhibition opens tomorrow and will be on show till November 1.
The ambitious Moscow-Thessaloniki-2009 program on show at MIET in the context of the Second Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennale (which continues its very successful path) will feature works from a dynamic Russian collection — the collection of the Stella Art Foundation. Stella Art Foundation is a non-commercial institution set up in November 2004 at the initiative of collector Stella Kesaeva. Main purposes of the Foundation include supporting cultural exchanges, promotion of the creative effort of Russian artists and institution of a contemporary art museum in Moscow. The Foundation takes a very dynamic part in all the major international contemporary art events (documenta, Venetian Biennale) and cooperates with important museum institutions of different countries (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice). It is also implementing an extensive charity program.
Starting from October 2008, the Foundation has arranged presentations of its collection at important European sites, always in cooperation with local curators who were responsible for the selection of the theme of each exhibition and the works put on show. The most recent shows were held at the Viennese Kunsthistorisches Museum under the title That Obscure Object of Art and in the Venetian Ca’ Rezzonico Palazzo in the context of the parallel program of the Venice Biennale.
Thalea Stefanidou, curator of the exhibition at MIET, notes in her essay for the catalogue to be issued on the occasion of the exhibition:
“A collection accumulates fragments of creative time, creating documentations of the past for the future, while curating plays with the poetic quality of both the ephemeral and the accidental, and thus brings the collection to life in the present, inducing the spectator-accomplice,” [...] Three fields of activity and reflection: creating, collecting and curating, treated as three equally self-directed processes that permeate each other in order to depict renewed memory corrugations, so that the collection becomes an occasion to create biographèmes, of the artist, the collector, the curator. This is a way to construct identities, or even better, one identity of plural self. [...] How is an art work structured? How is a collection ‘built’? How is the content of a collection restructured in relation to new spaces of its reception and the curatorial task? All these are questions that in order to be answered lead to the three-sectioned, organizational mechanism, which is based on a self that decides and that creates an organic system, a whole, a whole every time different."
The viewers will see works of the following artists: Yuri Albert, Nikita Alexeyev, Yuri Avvakumov, Vagrich Bakhchanian, Alexei Buldakov, Olga Chernysheva, Michael Craig-Martin, Evgenia Emets, Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich, Alexandra Galkina, Alexander Glinitsky, Dmitry Gutov, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Alex Kats, Maria Konstantinova, Joseph Kosuth, Oleg Kulik, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andrei Monastyrsky, Ilya Trushevsky, Stas Polnarev, Dmitry Tsvetkov, Spencer Tunick.
