Elena Konyushihina1; 1 The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK
Discussion
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the representation of the Soviet past through exhibition practices of Russian artist Arseny Zhilyaev. This paper explores the artistic medium of the museum or exhibition as ‘institutional critique’ or ‘conceptual installation’ aimed at reviving the Soviet museology tradition, heritage of modernism and Moscow conceptualism in a contemporary imaginary museum. The analysis centers on Arseny Zhilyaev’s envisioning of an imaginary museum of the past and future, exemplified by the Intergalactic Mobile Fedorov Museum-Library in Berlin (2017). Grounded in the philosophy of Russian Cosmism, which incorporates the concept of 'material resurrection' and elements of the Soviet museum design of the 1970s into its installations, the paper argues for representation of the Soviet past as a productive space between fiction and reality. Conceptual museum displays function as pivotal representations of the ongoing dialogue between Moscow Conceptualist artists and Zhilyaev’s practice.
