The Museum of screen culture MediaArtLab
Organized by: the MediaArtLab Centre for Art and Culture, the Museum and Exhibition Center «Manege»
Exposition opens on November, 29
The Museum and Exhibition Center «Manege» (Moscow, Manegnaja Square 1), Ground floor
The MediaArtLab Centre for Art and Culture was founded more than twelve years ago. It was the first Russian institution that started exploring media art in Russia. Since its foundation the Centre has implemented a set of projects: the Media Forum MIFF (a festival within a festival, a major review of world video and media art with large-scale exhibitions realized in partnership with various Moscow art venues as part of Media Forum), symposium «Pro&Contra», «MediaArtClub» and «NonStop-Media» projects, «Tranzitland» and «Expanded Cinema» exhibitions and many other projects.
Nowadays the Center is gaining its own exhibition space in the Museum and Exhibition Center «Manege» and is providing access to its media archives — the large collection of media art, which have been forming since the foundation of the organization in 1991. This archive contains more than 2000 items — from works of the media art pioneers to recent works of video art, archival documents and so on.
The new Museum will be the platform for the carrying experimental exhibitions, shows, multimedia performances; it is going to be a kind of interactive laboratory which will be an educational center as well and will allow presenting the basic stages of media art history.
The activities of the Museum will not be isolated only inside its space. We plan to start a major regional educational project in collaboration with leading Russian Universities, to create moveable mobile exhibition projects and also to expand into urban space with the Media Facades and Mobile Cinema projects.
Besides, we plan to realize major exhibition projects of Russian and Western artists in the mail hall of the Museum and Exhibition Center «Manege» as part of the Museum’s activities. Our plans for the near future include an exposition within the MIFF Media Forum on controlled cinema and montage, a multimedia show by Peter Greenaway on the Golden Age of Russian and Dutch art, the State of Image exhibition of Zbigniew Rybczynski and Gábor Bódy and many others.
The main departments of the Museum of screen culture MediaArtLab:
- Media Gallery with zones various at their functions and access to the MediaArtLab archive;
- Educationalprograms with laboratories, workshops, lectures, conferences;
- Exhibition Space with a regularly changing exhibition — a platform to present up to date media art projects.
History of the project
The Museum of Screen Culture is the result of a long intensive work of the MediaArtLab Centre for arts and culture. Collection of media art has been forming over more than ten years in one of the main priorities of the Center — the establishing of an audiovisual archive of media culture, collecting and turning into museum works of contemporary art associated with new technologies (video art, net art, sound art, software art, CD -ROM art, interactive art).
MediaArtLab activities from the outset aimed at promoting contemporary art, forming the cultural context, and providing of open access to the media culture heritage of our time, theoretical and critical texts about it. The first step in creating professionally annotated collection of media art with public access was the MEDIATEKA (Media Library) in 2000. It consisted of Russian, European and American artists’ works, including the pioneers of video art. There are texts, collection of video art (from the 60’s to the present day), CD-ROM-art and works of net art — altogether more than 2000 objects.
Taking this direction MedArtLab has realized a number of exhibitions and educational projects both in Russia and abroad. Among them: the annual festival Media Forum of Moscow International Film Festival, an international interdisciplinary symposium Pro&Contra; network regional project «NonStopMedia»; educational project «Poliekran» (with the NCCA, Nizhny Novgorod), distance course «Media Culture/Modern Art» (created for The MSSES, Faculty of cultural management), as well as many workshops, demonstrations, discussions and debates.
Concept of The Museum of screen culture was first presented in 2007 within the parallel program of 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2007. MediaArtLab held the project «Media Museum Virtual Theatre» at the Theatre of Nations. For two nights the audience acquainted with a range of films reflecting the development of media technologies and it’s shift from theater to cinema and back to theater. Also there were presented a number of contemporary plastic performances joining dance with the media context, and performances in which the role of the media is reduced to auxiliary props and investigated with spectacular artistic strategies. Additionally the project included the «Virtual theatre, technology and artist» exhibition.
The next stage in the development of the media museum concept was the large-scale exhibition held at the site of the «Factory Project» in the NCCA festival «Collections» in 2008. It was realized with the support of the «A Changing Museum in a Changing World» competition for museum projects by Vladimir Potanin Foundation. The exhibition «Media Museum» was not only presentation of the MediaArtLab collection, but it also laid down the key directions for the future work on the project. Media Museum was presented as a type of mobile art institution, a kind of interactive laboratory that allows empirical and experimental way to comprehend the basics of media universe and media culture, develop and build philosophical concepts expressed in the material world images.
Also, the project has published the catalog «MEDIAMUSEUM» representing collection of media art, accompanied by original texts by the MediaArtLab experts. Full electronic version of the catalog is available at www.mediamuseum.ru. Also on this site the user will find additional texts about media culture, artworks descriptions, 3D models of key works in the story of media art, information about network projects, etc.
