Alienation mechanism. Program "Collection. Viewpoint"

Curator: Olga Turchina

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents a new exhibition "The Mechanism of Alienation" as part of the MMOMA Educational Center’s program "Collection. Viewpoint. The project addresses one of the fundamental foundations of the cultural myth of the 20th century - the phenomenon of alienation and entropy, detachment and distancing.

The problem of alienation has a rich historical and philosophical experience. From antiquity to our time, this concept has changed depending on the context, the social system and its problems. In Russian philosophy, the development of the phenomenon of alienation refers to the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The starting point for the creation of the exhibition was the conversation between Andrei Monastyrsky and Iosif Bakshtein about the methodological specifics of Moscow conceptualism. In their dialogue, the "mechanism of alienation" is mentioned as one of the notable elements of his artistic language and is interpreted as an immediate ultimate alienation from one’s own production, whether it be a work of art or a simple everyday statement.

For artists of the post-war period and contemporary authors, this meaning is interpreted in a different way: it acquires either a generalized character, or, conversely, aggravated, where this “mechanism” turns out to be a means of escaping or isolating from too difficult, unbearable circumstances. All stages of development and various interpretations of this phenomenon become the key object of consideration in the presented project.

The exposition space will show works by artists of different trends of the second half of the 20th century, consisting of three groups of authors: representatives of post-war art, the conceptualists of the 1970s and the heirs of the conceptualists.

Artists: Nikita Alekseev, Pyotr Belenok, Eric Bulatov, Nikolai Vechtomov, Anya Zhelud, Ilya Kabakov, Nikolai Kozlov, Irina Korina, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Boris Matrosov, Andrey Monastyrsky, Maria Naimushina, Irina Nakhova, Timofei Parshchikov, Dmitry Prigov, Mikhail Roginsky, Andrey Roiter, Boris Sveshnikov, Vasily Sitnikov, Alena Tereshko, Eduard Steinberg, Vladimir Yakovlev

PROGRAM COLLECTION. VIEWPOINT IN MMOMA

"Collection. Viewpoint” is a long-term exhibition program developed specifically for the MMOMA Educational Center in addition to the series of large-scale thematic expositions that has become a landmark for the museum. It is distinguished by a different, focal and chamber approach to the study and demonstration of museum collections, as well as a much more dynamic rhythm of the show. The program brings together a variety of exhibitions by type - from monographic and archival to interdisciplinary. Dedicated to the study of individual segments of the collection, these essentially laboratory projects often turn to private, non-mainstream, artistic subjects and allow testing new exhibition solutions. The program provides an opportunity to consider a wide range of phenomena - names, trends, images and ideas in Russian art of the XX-XXI centuries - from various positions and angles.

The program was launched at the end of 2017 and is implemented by the curators of the MMOMA Science Department. Program authors: Andrey Egorov, Anna Harutyunyan.