Kaliningrad/Konigsberg Museum of Contemporary Arts
MúzeumCafé 7.
As seen from Hungary, it is amazing to witness Russia’s Cultural Ministry establishing a series of National Centres of Contemporary Art. To date, museums, exhibition halls, scientific workshops and experimental laboratories have opened in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad and Samara. The network of these independent institutions, their programmes displaying a high-level orientation in the virtual space of contemporary arts, and the museological and urban plans involving selection and conversion of buildings all show how deeply articulated and complex is the current structure of Russian cultural institutions, as is the market. In recent years I have been to the Moscow centre several times and this spring photographer Tamás Dezső and I visited the institution in Kaliningrad, which is still undergoing reconstruction.
Kaliningrad’s Museum of Contemporary Art is functioning even during reconstruction in the former Kronprinz Barracks on today’s Litovsky Val, a building of the local fortress erected in 1843-48. The institution, which from 1997 used a variety of temporary exhibition venues, obtained the red brick Kronprinz in 2003. Its reconstruction is a characteristic example of an urban context being established by the transformation of museums of contemporary art and architectural heritage, similarly to what is taking place in Nizhniy Novgorod and what is planned for St. Petersburg. The vast fortress, which will mainly continue to house a polytechnic and halls of residence, is situated outside the old centre, yet ‘distance’ is a matter of perspective. Kaliningrad is a small-to-medium-size town, so when the urban space is dynamically modified the Kronprinz may constitute part of the centre. The architectural principles of the fortress were based on experiences of the Swedish-Russian war, thus Russian, German, as well as Swedish and Belgian military engineers left their traces during its construction. We should not forget that the entire fortress system was built in what was then Konigsberg, and thus a basic question for the town and the contemporary art institution concerns how it will connect to the past, how it will relate to the dramatic transformation the city experienced after 1945, when from one day to the next everything changed.
Contemporary art and the politics of memory are closely connected here, because the potential ‘regional art’ of Kaliningrad’s present-day Russian residents lacks the knowledge and myths necessary for the role of local artists. It is clear that contemporary artists have understood they have no alternative to constantly reflecting on the region’s dual history and utilising the fact that this rather eerie past is not particularly suitable for generating high standards of regionality. Thus the most important feature of the ‘Kaliningrad paradigm’ is that it raises the practice of contemporary artists above the logic and requirements created by the cultural geography of a traditional small or medium-size town. The spirit of town K. involves turning its ‘floating’ nature, a consequence partly of radical and ironic archeology and partly of the privilege of being an exclave-cum-enclave, into some advantage. It is clear that contemporary art here does not reflect provincialism, since Konigsberg continuously radiates through Kaliningrad.