Curator: Oleg Kulik

Organizer: TSUM Art Foundation

Artists:

• Oleg Kulik

In cooperation with Victor Ribas, Denis Kryuchkov, Hermes Zygott

Curator’s assistant: Vasilina Allakhverdieva

Music score: Guns Pat.Holman

The MOSCOW. TSUM project is a meditation on the sacral themes of the 1970s-1990s Moscow contemporary art. The “sacral” is understood here both as the aesthetical value of an artistic statement, and as its mystic, magic, esoteric or religious drive.

MOSCOW. TSUM is Oleg Kulik’s comment on the art history of the late 20th century.
The project does not claim to be historically objective, it presents quite a subjective and very spectacular story. Its aim is to revise the artistic action from the point of view of the sacred spectacle (a mystery, an orgy, a liturgy, a “common cause”). The main nerve of the project is in the transformation of the greatest action art events of recent past into the common visual space of the Kabakov-type total installation, and in the translation of local events into the language of contemporary light and sound installation.

MOSCOW. TSUM is an Oleg Kulik’s attempt to understand what among the things produced during the recent 3-4 decades is still seen today, what fully sounds today, and it is also an attempt to create a “spatial liturgy” based on the Moscow contemporary art, mainly in the form of actions and performances. The author already experimented with the genre of the spatial liturgy in his I Believe project (The Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2007), and his production of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine (Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 2009).