After the Viennese Kunsthistorisches Museum and the 53rd Venice Biennale, works from the collection of the Stella Art Foundation will be on show under the general title Moscow-Thessaloniki-2009 at Thessaloniki Cultural Center of the National Bank’s Educational Foundation (108 Vasilissis Olgas Str.) in the context of the parallel program of the Second Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennale.
Stella Art Foundation is a non-commercial organization created in November 2004 at the initiative of Stella Kesaeva. Main purposes of the Foundation include supporting cultural exchanges, promotion 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, Venice Biennale) and cooperates with important museum institutions of different countries (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice). It is also implementing an extensive charity program.
Subjective Visions is just one version in a cycle of independent exhibitions of works from the collection of the Stella Art Foundation, which was launched in October 2008 at the Viennese Kunsthistorisches Museum under the title That Obscure Object of Art, and continued — with another version — at the Venetian Ca’ Rezzonico in the context of the parallel program of the Biennale of this Italian city.
One common point of all the exhibitions is that all the works presented at them belong to the collection of the Stella Art Foundation. The exhibition at the National Bank’s Educational Foundation (MIET) was curated by Thalea Stefanidou, who notes in her essay prepared for the catalogue issued specially on that occasion: “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 exhibition features works by the following artists: Nikita Alexeyev, Yuri Avvakumov, Vagrich Bakhchanian, 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.
