The National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) in Moscow is being merged with Rosizo, the state museum that is run by the ministry of culture. The museum will be run by Sergei Perov, the general director of Rosizo who has said that he learned everything he needs to know about management in military school.
In an interview in the Izvestia newspaper last year, Perov, the general director of Rosizo who will now run the merged museums, spoke of his admiration for Soviet art. When he first started at the museum, Perov said, he was told the story of a visitor to a Soviet art exhibition who was so inspired that he suddenly wished to work in a factory.
In April, Rosizo launched a programme to bring Soviet Socialist realism back to the masses. “High-quality reproductions” of 27 works by key artists from the 1920-40s, among them Alexander Laktionov and Yuri Pimenov, are being taken to 29 small and mid-sized cities with the goal of instilling appreciation for qualities including “military heroism” and “feats of labour”.
“Two similar government agencies, even if they have a high-level of cooperation, are not able to reach their goals as effectively as one big organisation,” said the culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, according to a report on the ministry’s website.
But on Thursday, Russia’s arts scene was rife with suggestions that the main reason for the merger was the NCCA’s involvement in a scandal surrounding the nomination of political protest artist Pyotr Pavlensky for its state-sponsored Innovatsiya (innovation) prize. In February, the NCCA’s long-standing director Mikhail Mindlin announced that Pavlensky was being removed from the list of nominees. The artist had been in the running for Threat, his 2015 performance in which he set fire to the door of the Federal Security Service and former KGB building on Lubyanka Square, Moscow. Several critics and curators resigned in protest from the selection committee following Mindlin’s decision. Pavlensky is currently on trial in Moscow for allegedly “damaging cultural heritage”.
Perov also praised Rosizo's new dedicated exhibition space in the culture pavilion of VDNH, a Stalin-era fairgrounds that is being rebranded as a museum venue by the Moscow city government. VDNH is the theme of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which opened this week.
In an unusual twist, the ministry announced Friday that Mindlin had been appointed director of the Central Andrei Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art, which specialises in icons. Mindlin began his career in the 1980s as a fine art restorer.
