Сентябрь

From 9 to 13 of September four students from Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and three from Smolny College participated in an class lead by Finnish/American artist Liisa Roberts.
The course focused on defining museum borders in time and space, and somehow analyzing the relationship between museum and  viewer, and museum and artist in general. To begin, students were visitors to a number of Saint-Petersburg apartment museums such as the Dostoevsky apartment, Fontanny dom of Anna Achmatova and quite a new museum of Lev Gumelev, that was created in his apartment two years after the scientist died.
After lectures by Olesya Turkina, Lisa Roberts, Emily Newman and Maria Godovannaya devoted to international annual exhibitions and festivals students tried to compare different museum spaces, to estimate positions of an artist, a curator and a viewer.
This analyzing process was based on personal experience, intuition and also, what turned out to be very important, the cultural exchange between Russian and Finnish students. The expansion of our personal, cultural perspective on these museums helped us in forming our own ideas about artworks we could make in response.
The course was intensive and inspiring and becomes a real base for a practice, for a real work, what is extremely rare in university.

Jane Mukhina, Smolny