Stories from our Travels, Part V
In the fifth instalment of our ‘Stories from our Travels’, co-curator Ulrike Schmiegelt tells us about a trip that she and our curator Monika Flacke took to Moscow in search of additional objects for the exhibition. A further protagonist in the story: a sparrow on Stalin’s head countering Soviet nostalgia.
A Trip to Moscow
It is June 2010 and the time has come: Monika Flacke and I go to Moscow.
We are staying in a hotel on the Garden Ring, which is close to public transport and has a rather off-colour name, ‘Club 27’. It proves to be a city mansion, with a plush entrance done in red, a pompous circular dining room supported by columns, and very original rooms, which are decorated with murals of southern beaches that convey something of the Russians’ longing for the Mediterranean and have windows placed so high that we have no view of Moscow’s grey streets.
Our agenda in Moscow includes an all-day meeting with colleagues from the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, where we want to present our concept and discuss the relevance Russian artists in its implementation; a get-together with a free-lance curator; several museum visits; and naturally some sightseeing.
Our first day is taken up almost entirely with travel, because getting around Moscow is a slow business, as is checking into our hotel, not to mention the loss of two hours because of the time difference. In the end, we only have time for a first look around, which nonetheless turns into a trek through the city lasting several hours, with walking distances also being longer than the map would indicate.
Our conference is the next day. No less than seven colleagues await our arrival at the Centre, with one having travelled from the museum branch in Kaliningrad just for the occasion. All of them are very well prepared for our visit, which allows us to move quickly from a brief round of introductions into our discussions. This is goes more smoothly than we had even dared to expect, and after a concluding tour of the current exhibition we leave the Centre convinced that this visit alone will have justified our trip.
Our visit the next day to the State Tretyakov Gallery provided us with a comprehensive look at the artists and artworks discussed the day before. An unexpected staff meeting prevented the curator from meeting us, but we were able to identify our favourites anyway. And our tour through the Gallery’s sculpture garden, which has provided a new home for numerous works in the Social Realism tradition, and a meal in the very traditional ‘Bufet’, the Russian canteen, helped us in the end to discover slight feeling of Soviet nostalgia—which was ironically interrupted when a sparrow landed on Stalin’s head.
The Moscow summer was unfortunately showing us its worst side, with rain coming down in buckets almost the entire time and our shoes ruined by the end of the trip. Those sidewalks weren’t quite as smooth as they initially appeared.
- Ulrike Schmiegelt
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If you missed earlier ‘Stories from our Travels’, you can find them here.
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