Thursday 09 March 2017, 7:00pm — 9:00pm

22 Calvert Avenue, London

As part of The Future Remains: Revisiting Revolution season of events, Calvert 22 Foundation is delighted to partner with The Vladimir Potanin Foundation for a dynamic discussion on the Russian culture and art of the 20th century.

How do we present Russian history through art? How do we move away from dry facts that we know from textbooks and visualise history instead?

Taking the book Russia. The Twentieth Century published by the Vladimir Potanin Foundation as starting point, the discussion will provide an unusual approach to exploring and understanding the Russian culture of the 20th century.

This rich era encapsulated revolutions and wars, the conquest of outer space, shifting ideologies, theatre reform, and the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Instead of incorporating essays or scholarly articles, the book focuses solely on presenting art history through visual codes – the objects and artifacts – that have come to symbolize their time. This includes political posters, folk art and paintings by Soviet and Russian artists, household items, commemorative medals, fashion magazine covers, and stills from popular films.

Experts in art and visual culture will discuss how Russian art has developed in the last 100 years, as well as analyse some of its most prominent symbols.

The discussion will also touch on the launch of a new digital course by Arzamas Academyincorporating video and audio lectures on Russian art of the 20th century.  A Russian non-commercial educational project, Arzamas is a hybrid of a free online university and an educational magazine.

Participating speakers:

Arseny Meshcheryakovis the art director and compiler of the publication Russia. The Twentieth Century and the Head of HSE Art and Design School in Moscow. He is also the founder of Agey Tomesh Design Bureau, one of the first of its kind in Russia, with works awarded at Russian and international competitions.

Tatiana Mrdulyash is the Deputy Director for Development at The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Tatiana joined the Tretyakov Gallery in March 2015 as Counsel to the Director General, one of her first projects with the museum being the development strategy for 2015–2025.  From June 2015, she leads the museum’s communications and fundraising teams. Tatiana sees her main goals as increasing museum attendance and improving visitor and partner experience with the Tretyakov Gallery.

Anna Moszynska is one of the UK’s foremost lecturers in contemporary art. She pioneered the study of contemporary art in Britain at Sotheby’s Institute London, later overseeing the development of her original course into its internationally acclaimed MA in Contemporary Art. She has devised and taught courses in New York, Basel, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and France as well as at numerous other institutions in Britain. Anna is also a curator and an extensively published author whose books have been translated into several languages. She is a member of the International Art Critics Association.

Kate McMillan is a London-based artist and Teaching Fellow at King's College, London, whose work incorporates sculpture, film, sound, installation and photography. She is interested in the linking narratives of forgetting and place. Her most recent solo exhibition, at Castor Projects in London in 2016, was titled Songs for Dancing, Songs for Dying. She is currently working towards a major solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bethanian for December 2017, titled The Ghosts of Material Things. In 2016, she was invited to undertake a residency in St Petersburg as part of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), where she developed new film works to be shown in Russia in 2017.

The discussion will be moderated by Oksana Oracheva, the General Director of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation.