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Curator: Natalia Tamruchi
Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents two projects, united by curator Natalia Tamruchi in the museum venue at 17 Ermolaevsky lane. The exhibitions are Andrei Kuzkin’s The Right to Life and the Dentures and Replacements by art group MishMash. Andrei Kuzkin, the winner of Innovation state prize in New Generation nomination (2009), and artistic duo of Misha Leikin and Masha Sumnina, created in 2000, are in one place not by mere chance. Despite the fact that the projects are independent, their authors have their own aims and use different methods, but the starting materials of both projects are in close proximity, within sight of each other.

Occupying the first three floors of the museum, Kuzkin’s project comprises the scaled photo and video documentation of 70 actions and performances, occurred during the last 8 years of the author’s active artistic career. Photo pads, specially created for the exhibition, are, according to the author, material evidences of memory, deliberately turning the exhibition into a retrospective.

The Dentures and Replacements project by duo MishMash is on the fifth floor of the museum. It presents items and texts, also associated with the action art period of the art group. The authors find out how a subjective descriptive text or an object, acting as an artifact, conserving the memories of the event, can serve as a tool for fixing memory and how this fixation corresponds to the truth.

The artists are not just engaged in similar practices. They actively interact, participating in each other's actions. No wonder, that there are many echoes, points of contact and even zones of alignment between the exhibitions. For example, the exposition will present a video by their mutual friend, artist Vladimir Machinsky. The video shows the Green Swings action, whose authorship could be disputed by any party.

Both projects are about forms of fixing memory, about traces that an event leaves. In this case, the event is an action or a performance. And they are also about to what extent these traces can hold memories or can become a new memory unit, a new artwork, which hastens to occupy the empty place.

As a result, the viewer is provided with two close, but not quite the same viewpoints on the same events and things. And he has an opportunity to engage in this game of cross signs, to start searching for similarities and differences, i.e. to see more than he could, if we show each project individually.

About the curator:

Natalia Tamruchi is an art historian, art critic, curator, director of the Foundation for Art Projects “Open Gallery”. She graduated from the Department of Art History, Lomonosov Moscow State University. She was an author- compiler of anthologies in art in the Soviet Artist Publishing House. She participated in the first publications of unofficial art (Drugoe Iskusstvo magazine, 1988 and others). In 1989-1993, she together with A. Erofeev and V. Levashov worked on the formation of the first museum collection of contemporary Russian art in the Tsaritsyno museum. The collection was later transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1996-2008, she worked as a designer and an architect. She was the winner of several prizes for architecture and design. In 2009, she won the first prize in nomination Public Interior at the architectural competition Under the Roof of the House. In 2008, she created the Foundation for Art Projects “Open Gallery”, which has been operating up till now. In 2013 and in 2014, she was a member of the Advisory Council of Kandinsky Prize.