Anyone holding an individual vigil in Russia today risks a lot: Yekaterina Muromzew’s “Mahnwache” (Piket) from 2019, currently on view as part of the Diversity United exhibition in the New Tretyakov Gallery.
Image: Ekaterina Muromtseva
In Moscow, the NGO “Memorial” is to be liquidated. This gives the Diversity United exhibition, which has now opened in the Tretyakov Gallery, new explosiveness.
I.n the one year delay with which the exhibition of European contemporary art Diversity United opened in Moscow due to the pandemic, the project seems to have become almost toxic for the Russian rulers. Neither a representative from the Ministry of Culture nor the Foreign Ministry appeared at the ceremony in the west wing of the New Tretyakov Gallery, although the event concludes the Year of German Culture in Russia; the patron Vladimir Putin only sent his special representative for international cultural cooperation Mikhail Schwydkoi.
But the German ambassador Géza Andreas von Geyr reminded that the show was held in the German-Russian discussion forum Petersburg Dialogue – whose three member organizations, the Liberal Modern Center, German-Russian Exchange and the Forum of Russian-Speaking Europeans, were banned in Russia, which is why the dialogue has been frozen. Von Geyr also lamented the dramatic dwindling freedom of civil society in Russia, indirectly referring to the historical Memorial Society, whose dissolution, demanded by the public prosecutor, is being negotiated this Thursday. Schwydkoi, on the other hand, spoke of the new walls within Europe, which the artists would know how to overcome, which is why the exhibition represents the very space between Lisbon and Vladivostok to which Russia naturally belongs.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/moscows-struggle-for-cultural-power-russia-is-threatened-with-memory-loss/
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