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Vortrag

The Gapar Aitiev Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts, the Memomusor Project and the ‘trashification’ of historical memory

Кыргызский Национальный музей изобразительных искусств имени Гапара Айтиева, арт-проект "Мемомусор" и "мусорификация" исторической памяти 

Lecture by Lilit Dabagian

The lecture and discussion will be held in Russian language.

At the Long Night of Museums in 2019, in a tiny exhibition space at the Gapar Aitiev Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts (KGMI) were showcased material objects and archival documents from different decades discovered in the basement of the institution some months before: a record of the war simulation game during the Cold War, statement letters from workers in the period of the Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign, museum’s application at the height of the deficit, the announcement of an extravagant exhibition during the economic crisis period of the 1990s, and other fragments from the history of everyday life of the National Museum of Fine Arts. However, soon later the museum itself, without explicit statement, withdrew and ceased associating itself with the archival art exhibition “Museum Sort Out Its Archives” curated by a staff worker of KGMI and two independent co-curators and more so - destroyed the archival materials.

The talk reflects on what turned out to be an involuntary art intervention that occurred during the work on the exhibition, which testifies to the complex relation of the National Fine Arts Museum in Bishkek to its own less glorious history of everyday life as well as the institutions understanding of art as such. As an attempt to decode the unconscious of the museum institution through an analysis of the radical actions it took against its own archives, it argues that archival objects here played a subversive role. As the discovered fragments of mundane life transcended the limits of the official canon of the established historical myth it, according to the logic of the art institution, threatened to deprive the museum from its aura of being ‘a temple of art’. The presentation draws from a wide range of empirical material comprising participant observation, auto-ethnography, and creative visual documentation, as the reflection is supplemented by a documentary graphic story about the events related to the work with the archival objects. 

Lilit Dabagian is an independent media researcher and works as a freelance project designer and workshop leader in the field of intergenerational memory projects within the "post-socialist" space. As part of the online history camp "Coping with Painful Pasts" (2020), funded by the Körber Foundation, she worked with young participants from Georgia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova on constructive and creative ways of coming to terms with the past. She co-initiated and co-curated various socio-cultural and artistic projects such as the Pamir-Moscow. Festival of Cultures (2017), a cultural event on labor migration in Russia, and Visualizing Memory (2018-), an ongoing series of sensory-sociological urban memory projects (Bishkek, Yerevan,https://readymag.com/sensorysociology/2726130/). She studied Liberal Arts at Bard College Berlin and Media Production in Creative Industries at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. 

This lecture is organised by the research unit Representations of the Past in cooperation with the Leibniz Research Alliance "Wert der Vergangenheit". It will be moderated by Florian Coppenrath (ZMO).

Please register at david.leupold@zmo.de

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