UniCredit Group will organize the exhibition “People & the City” in Moscow. On the occasion of the Year of Italian Culture and Language in Russia and of the Year of Russian Culture and Language in Italy, UniCredit Group will present in Moscow the exhibition “People & the City”, a project by the Scientific Commission UniCredit for Art. From October 21th to December 4th 2011, in the Red Hall of Moscow Contemporary Art Center Winzavod, Moscow, visitors will have the possibility to admire 80 works - from the rich Unicredit Art collection - that highlight the relationship between people and city, starting from the XX century.

A real international artistic survey about the city as stage for the contemporary life and works from all around the world: Russia, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Austria, United States. The exhibition includes paintings, photos and installations of some of the most important artists from the 20th century: De Chirico and Morandi, Cartier-Bresson and Christo, Basilico and Jodice. This exhibition is consistent with UniCredit Group’s mission, whose art collection, including more than 60,000 works all reflecting the Group identity.

OCTOBER 10

14.00 GLOBAL MEDIA SECTION

Alexey Shulgin (Artist, Russia), Elena Аrtemenko (The Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia, Russia) — Artlet, Art of the Globalized World;
Andrey Parshikov (Curator, art critic, Russia) — Sentimental video as a way to combat fashizoid optics;
Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez (Media-artist and researcher, Germany/ Brazil) — Digital Anthropophagy and the Anthropophagic Re-Manisesto  of the Digital Age  

15.30
A film by The Yes Men group (USA): The Yes Men save the world (2009)...

A major retrospective tracing the prolific career of performance artist Marina Abramović will go on show at Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture from 8 October to 4 December 2011. Curated by Klaus Biesenbach, the exhibition features approximately 50 works spanning more than four decades of her early interventions, sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances.

Internationally recognized as a pioneer of performance art, Abramović has been testing the boundaries of performance for over 30 years, presenting work that physically and mentally challenges the performer and the viewer. Since the beginning of Abramović’s career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, the body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. This retrospective will introduce Abramović, widely acclaimed for the importance of her contribution to the history of performance art, to a Russian audience. In so doing, it follows in the footsteps of worldwide exhibitions of Abramović’s oeuvre such as Balkan Baroque, presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Seven Easy Pieces at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005), and in Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010).

ART MOSCOW is renewed annually, not only presenting to the public new works, names and galleries, but also introducing vital changes, which deeply affect the development of the project. This year the number of experts in the Expert Council enlarged by entering foreign professionals from Great Britain (Rachael Barrett) and Germany (Anne Maier). The structure of exposition area was also altered. Following the international experience, ART MOSCOW offered the system of equal exposition area. Galleries are offered to stand out for the quality of their expositions but not for their size. During the 2011 ART MOSCOW representations appeared in international activities at key sites of the world art scene in Berlin, Cologne, London, Madrid and Basel. The result of foreign activity is the increased number of foreign participants and the expanding pool of foreign participants in mass-media.  

The main project will be held in two venues: the ARTPLAY Design Center and the TsUM Art Foundation (the exhibition space of the TsUM department store). Peter Weibel, a prominent artist, new media expert and head of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, is curator of the main project, which will welcome about 80 artists from more than 20 different countries.

The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art is considered one of the largest, most prestigious and trend-setting contemporary art events in Russia and abroad. It owes its immense popularity to the participation of leading curators, philosophers and experts of present-day art. This year the organizing committee has opted for Peter Weibel to curate the main project.