Collection. The Order of Things. The final exhibition by students, graduates and teachers of the HSE Art and Design School

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art together with the HSE Art and Design School are proud to present Collection the final exhibition by students, graduates and teachers of the school. This is the seocnd time for the museum and the school. This year the exhibition is dedicated to collecting, a significant phenomenon of the Modern Age and its contemporary interpretation.

The practice of collecting different kinds of objects of common features is inherent to human beings. it is also a way of engaging with the world. The first collections were discovered in the tombs of ancient Egypt, and the first cabinets of rarities appeared in Europe in the 16th century, becoming one of the prototypes of the modern museum.

The exhibition project Collection invites us to explore the phenomenon of the collection in a contemporary context. The categories that organised kunstkamerias and rare objects cabinets, followed by museum collections, were sort of stable classical canons: the history of linear time, geography, fields of knowledge, techniques, materials, authorship. Contemporary times, on the other hand, drew attention to specific, unexpected and highly original principles of joining objects into specific narratives. Timeless and cross-historical categories, contexts, which earlier were difficult to present together, are now replacing rational and encyclopaedic ways of connecting things. Thus, things and phenomena are broken out of their usual taxonomies and brought together in whimsical assemblages.

It is to this phenomenon that the exhibition creators refer to as the “postkunstkammer” and dedicate this project. Indeed, according to the curators, when we collect artefacts we collect worlds. The exhibition will feature not only strange and unobvious collections of objects, but also reflections on the very nature of collecting, new approaches and methods of connecting objects. After all, today it is more a process with an open result than an obsession with possession of things. It is a research and experiment to discover the optics of an author.

The exhibition will feature works by over 80 contemporary student and graduate artists, executed in a wide range of mediums: graphics, photography, installation, video art, game and sound design.

The exhibition is complemented by a parallel Lectures on Collecting programme. It comprises open lectures and discussions by the HSE Art and Design Shool, as well as invited experts in the history and practices of collecting and institutional critique. The discussions are to consider how the collections of 19th and 20th century public museums were formed and how they changed. They will also explore the shifts in these institutions provoked by the digital age, what drives the collector and how private collections are developing in the art space, when a collection becomes an artist’s medium and what meanings it can reveal to the viewer, and other topics ranging from classical art to big data and contemporary music.

The Art and Design School

The Art and Design School is a department of the Higher School of Economics and leading academic institution in the field of design, fashion and art in Russia. It has four campuses in different cities and more than 15 educational areas, art workshops and studios, a film pavilion, theatre and fashion clusters, and a contemporary art gallery HSE ART GALLERY. Since its opening in 2018, thegallery has held more than 40 exhibitions, both of independent contemporary artists and of students. The gallery's mission is to promote and support young artists – students of various disciplines on the basis of a fully staffed venue. The school takes part in city, Russian and international art and design events. This includes the Telling Stories festival founded by the HSE Faculty of Creative Industries in 2018 to celebrate trends, innovations and the latest achievements in media, art, design and creative industries.

Images

Alexandra Pavlovskaya. Body of Memory. 2023

Alina Matveeva. Pear Scent. 2024

Alina Svetkina. Kilometres of Stories. 2023

Diana Smirnova. The Little Things of Life. 2024

Tatiana Vedernikova. Terrain Gallery. 2022

Ulyana Sorokina. Once Upon a Time to Everyone. 2023