Russian Dreams, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, December 4, 2008 - February 8, 2009.

Russian Dreams presents work by contemporary artists from Russia. On view at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami from December 4, 2008 to February 8, 2009, the exhibition is a collaboration between the Bass and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. It includes work by established artists such as the AES+F Group; Alexander Ponomarev; Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov; Dmitri Gutov; Alexei Kostroma; and a new generation of younger artists including Julia Milner, Rostan Tavasiev, Haim Sokol, and MishMash Project. 

Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Ermolaevsky pereulok, February 14, 2008 – March 16, 2008.

The exhibition of the Russian sculptor Boris Orlov, held last March, initiated a survey of unofficial Russian art and its key individuals - a period that is currently in focus in the context of increasingly market-driven art practices.

The retrospective, entitled Earthly and Heavenly Warriors and sprawling over four floors of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art [MOMMA], numbered about 80 sculptures in all. Orlov's subjects are the Soviet ruling elite that he has rendered in a stylized and idiosyncratic manner, either carved as busts, portrait reliefs or sculptural installations. The torsos of varying sizes are in full regalia and embellished by medals, honors and elaborate epaulets. Painted in primary colors and crafted from wood, porcelain or bronze, the sculptures were over life size, once they had been positioned on freestanding plinths. The reliefs attached to the walls extended horizontally in a sequence akin to archaic totems. Covered by enamel - shiny and bright, these immobile symbols conjure up the atmosphere of celebrations that were so prominently featured on Soviet television. A grotesque parade of "immortal" heroes marches through the floors of the museum.

From June 28th to July 5th 2008, the 22nd Bologna Film Festival Cinema Ritrovato, dedicated to rare and restored films, hosted a large retrospective of the legendary Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. “We make films, Kuleshov made cinematography,” once wrote Vsevolod Pudovkin, one of Kuleshov’s distinguished disciples. This phrase, reflecting Kuleshov’s contribution to Russian cinema, became the motto of the retrospective. The program of the show spanned the period from 1917 to 1943 and included all of Kuleshov’s most famous films, a number of surviving fragments of his works made at different stages in his career, an early editing experiment The Model’s Even Eye Movement (Ravnomernoe dvizhenie glaz naturshchika), the kulturfilm Forty Hearts (Sorok serdets) and other pieces. The retrospective has received the attention of leading international scholars of Russian cinema, and will undoubtedly become a landmark event in the history of Kuleshov’s cultural reception in the West.

We discuss the show with Ekaterina Khokhlova – a film scholar, the granddaughter of the actress Aleksandra Khokhlova, the owner of Lev Kuleshov’s and Aleksandra Khokhlova’s private archive, and the director of The Eisenstein Library of Cinema Art in Moscow (Biblioteka kinoiskusstva imeni S.M. Eizenshteina, Moskva).