Enabling the continuation of my long cooperation (December 10 2012) Enabling the continuation of my long cooperation (December 10 2012)

Udo Kittelmann the 54 year old German curator and museum director has been announced as the first non-Russian commissioner to curate the Russian pavilion for the 2013 Venice Biennale. Stella Kesaeva the Commissioner of the Russian Pavilion announced the appointment stating “It was decided in April 2012 that the artist Vadim Zakharov would represent Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The idea of inviting Udo Kittelmann as curator followed from the choice of the artist. As a result, the Russian Pavilion will be curated by a citizen of another country for the first time in its history. Udo Kittelmann is one of the most renowned curators in the art world and his appointment is an important and conscious step, reflecting our principal objective, which is to bring Russian art out of isolation and secure for it the attention that it deserves at the highest international level.” Kittelmann responded with “I am greatly honoured that Vadim Zakharov proposed me as candidate for the curatorship and that the commissioner, Stella Kesaeva, supported the idea, enabling the continuation of my long cooperation with Vadim, which dates from the 1990s. I greatly admire the contribution, which Vadim Zakharov has made to contemporary art. His work has a continuity of development and is marked by a unique outlook and independence of artistic thought. His constant role as thinker and protagonist of the Moscow Conceptualist movement from the end of the 1970s remains a hallmark of his work right up to the present. As a curator, it gives me joy to be able to present this outstanding artist to a broad public. It would be hard to find a better place for an international exhibition of Vadim’s work than the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.”

 

Inspired by e-flux ow.ly/fRYB3 image source Olaf Kosinsky ow.ly/fRYoe