The artist was eager to go to the museum
But I ended up at a construction site
The Tver Imperial Travel Palace, which houses the regional art gallery, became the next object of the artistic experiment “Invasion of the Museum” by Valery Koshlyakov and curator Mikhail Dmitriev. The new strategy of introducing provincial museums to contemporary art, tested by this tandem more than six months ago at the Ivanovo Art Museum, for all its riskiness, turned out to be surprisingly viable.

The Travel Palace is the main attraction of Tver. And not at all because the main art museum with a rich collection of Russian painting of the 18th - early 19th centuries is located there. The Imperial Travel Palace, built at the end of the 18th century specifically for the arrival of Catherine II, is an impressive historical reminder of the glorious century when, according to the empress herself, Tver was the most beautiful Russian city after St. Petersburg. It is still customary to be proud of such remarks. As a result of such manipulations, the seemingly glaring cultural contradiction between past greatness and current desolation is painlessly resolved. Half of the Tver travel palace has been standing in the forests with its guts gutted for ten years now. There was no talk of any exhibitions there until the “dynamic couple” Koshlyakov and Dmitriev appeared in the former imperial chambers with their “Invasion of the Museum.”
The art project “Cabinet, or the effect of presence” was implemented precisely in the reconstructed part of the museum, that is, where only shabby walls remained from the rhetoric of the “glorious past of Tver”. Panels made of adhesive tape (Valery Koshlyakov’s signature material) draped the scaffolding, ornamental figures made of adhesive tape are at the very entrance, paintings made from it enliven the destroyed interior of the former palace library. The only living inhabitant of these ruins (besides the occasional visiting joiners and carpenters) is a granny caretaker. She was ordered to turn on the switch so that the “presence effect” stated in the title would take place. With a wave of her hand, the darkness of the hall, similar to an abandoned warehouse, is illuminated with neon light: it is emitted by a human figure, from which flashes of light reach the floor and corners. Thus, according to the artistic concept, the viewer finds himself in the space of “the resonant flow of the artist’s creative aggression and the living polyphony of cultural languages, rising from the depths of the museum’s deposits.”
The reconstruction of museum halls became a temporary and spatial gap into which a modern art project could easily squeeze. The ruins of the palace were marked by the aura of the artist, who did not want to notice the museum halls and storage rooms. The museum halls reciprocated his feelings.

IGOR Kommersant-Grebelnikov
The exhibition is open until September 30.

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 159 dated 08.29.2000, p. 10

Themes: