Exhibition by Anna Titova "Amazing journey of a mischievous"

The Vadim Sidur Museum and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art present the joint project "Amazing Journey of a Mischievous Man" - a research work by artist Anna Titova, which rethinks the updated permanent exhibition of the Vadim Sidur Museum. The work on the project took several years and also includes the reconstruction of the lost sculpture of Sidur and interaction with public organizations in the Perovo and Novogireevo districts. The project is the result of Anna Titova’s long-term study of the means and practices of reproducing socio-cultural ties that work in urban environments. Inspired by a critical reading of modernist urban utopias, gender studies of subjectivity, and Jane Bennett’s concept of distributed action in New Materialism, the artist explores the conditions under which hierarchical cultural systems are transformed into open and inclusive environments, and immersiveness becomes inclusiveness, endowing the audience with a new level of agency.

Photos by Ivan Erofeev

The “Amazing Journey of a Mischievous Man” consists of several parts: on the first floor, the results of work with the personal archive of Vadim Sidur are presented, on the second - with local self-organizations, in particular, with MamasUp and Perovo Architectural. Since its inception in the walls of a former flower shop in 1989, and especially after the transfer of the building to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2018, the Sidur Museum has strived to be a unique open environment for viewers with different needs and abilities. Titova’s project offers a new format for meeting spectators and viewers with works using the languages of installation, sculpture and animation. The animated boy Gopi, a character invented by Siddur for illustrations for the fairy tale of the Indian writer Vasamurti "The Amazing Journey of a Mischievous Man" (1969), became a kind of emblem of the project,

The project proposes to see the role of the museum in a new way, to rethink it through the prism of the idea of a public archive”, that is, a collection open to all, based on the understanding of culture as a “public resource, not an object of national property” (Claire Bishop), and the concept of radical education, which is based on the idea that a work is not a treasure that needs to be protected, but a knot of social relations, a relational object, designed to promote the liberation of those who use it socially and politically (Ligia Clark). The work here is the very new form of organization of social space, arising from the rethinking of the category of “modern” and the links of art with local stories that have a translocal or universal significance.

Anna Titova (b. 1984, Ulan-Ude) is an artist who works with various media, including installation, photography, sculpture and video. Graduated from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland (2006), Institute for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2008), Master’s degree from the Valand Academy of Arts, Gothenburg, Sweden (2010). The youngest participant of the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), special guest of Manifesta 10 (2014) and Armory Show (2017). Scholarship holder of the Young Artist grant from the Garage Museum (2015) and participant of the 1st Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art of the Garage Museum (2017). Participant of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), the 1st Riga Biennale of Contemporary Art (2018) and the Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art (2019). In 2014, Titova co-founded the Agency for Singular Research (ASI), an independent platform for critical discussion of current issues in art and artistic discourse. Personal projects include: “Sets redefine the city” (Cube. Moscow, 2021), “Flower Power. Archive" (MMOMA, 2019), "Message of the initiative group" (CTI "Fabrika", 2018), "Time Capsule" (Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, 2016), "Exchange Point" (Artwin Gallery, 2016), "Dystopia Park" )TsTI "Fabrika" 2015), Observatorium (outbuilding of a residential building, St. Petersburg, 2014), etc.

Lives and works in Moscow.