05.07.2017
From the moment of its foundation, the Hermitage was a museum that collected and displayed contemporary art. Thanks to this, today the museum’s stocks include acknowledged masterpieces that form an important part of the world’s cultural heritage.
Continuing this tradition, the museum keeps a close watch on tendencies in the world of contemporary art and holds exhibitions of outstanding contemporary artists from Russia and abroad, such as Boris Smelov, Timur Novikov, Anselm Kiefer, Henry Moore, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jan Fabre. For each exhibition we prepare educational programmes, the aim of which is to explore processes in contemporary art, to acquaint people with the context in which contemporary art exists and to establish links between the living art process and the art of the past. This work is traditionally performed by the Hermitage’s Youth Centre, which responds first and foremost to the demands of a young audience interested in what is taking place in the sphere of world culture today. The Youth Centre’s lectures and educational programmes are not intended to give an assessment of particular artistic phenomena of the present day, but are aimed at acquainting people with those phenomena. Ignoring, suppressing or giving a superficial treatment to the most outstanding phenomena always leads to them being incorrectly interpreted due to a lack of complete information. The task of the lecture cycles is to present the artistic process in its objective development, however controversial particular tendencies and figures within it might seem. At the same time, a very important element of any educational programme is dialogue.
The exhibition “Jan Fabre: Knight of Despair – Warrior of Beauty” evoked not only great public interest, but also unhealthy excitement about individual exhibits caused by deliberately incorrect interpretation of them. Due to this, the planned educational programme for the Fabre exhibition was amended to eliminate incorrect interpretations. It was decided not to go ahead with the piece of performance art “Mount Olympus” and a whole event entitled “Art Marathon”. Instead, the Youth Centre’s work was focussed on explaining the works that had evoked a mixed reaction. Among other things, an educational project “Intermedia: circles on the water” was successfully implemented. Its aim was to explore the varied public reaction to the exhibition, giving as objective a presentation as possible of the opinions of both supporters and opponents of the exhibition and the audience being invited to make up their own minds. Each week during the exhibition tours and meetings with visitors were arranged at which members of the museum staff examined various aspects of the exhibition’s concept, including the unbroken link between Jan Fabre’s art and the paintings of Flemish Old Masters.
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