Arseny Zhilyaev

Arseny Zhilyaev (Russian: Арсений Александрович Жиляев; born June 26, 1984, Voronezh) is a Russian contemporary artist best known for his projects that speculate on the possible future histories of art, using the museum as a medium.
Born on June 26, 1984 in Voronezh.
In 2006 he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and Psychology of the Voronezh State University. From 2006 to 2007 Zhilyaev studied at the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art and in 2010 he graduated from the Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden.
According to art critic Valentin Diaconov, by the end of the 2000s Zhilyaev became the "helmsman" of the New Boring generation. In early works (Rational Egoism, ‘Labour’ Market, 'October' Radio) the artist addresses the problems of cultural production and precarization of creative workers. The first exhibition using the museum as a medium Zhilyaev made in 2009 in Voronezh intitled New Museum of Revolution. This was the project where the time loop, which later became an important part of the artist's methodology, was used. Viewers found themselves in an indefinite future in the museum's exposition, which told about its past, that is, a time close to the temporality of the viewers themselves. A time shift of this kind made it possible to look at the present from a distance, to defamiliarize it and highlighting certain tendencies of the current moment. 
Two projects initiated in 2011 Pedagogical Poem (organized with Ilya Budraitskis, Katerina Chuchalina and the project team) and the Museum of Proletarian Culture. The Industrialization of Bohemia continued to develop this approach. In addition the artist turns to the study and re-actualization of the practices of early Soviet marxist museology, in particular to the experiments of the school of Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov. Both projects were devoted to the critical use of the museum as a medium, seeking to re-actualize its Marxist understanding. Initially conceived as research-based initiatives, they coincided with the largest street mobilization against unfair elections, as well as the organization of the Russian version of the Occupy movement. This led to the growth of the activist component of the projects and crucial transformation their structure. The Pedagogical Poem was shaped a series of educational workshops and artistic interventions in the former Museum of the Revolution "Red Presnya". Due to a political conflict with the museum's management, the originally planned additions to the permanent exposition was canceled, and the results of the educational workshops were presented in the form of an archival proposal called the Archive of the Future Museum of History. 
The Museum of Proletarian Culture. The Industrialization of Bohemia dealt with a different dilemma. The exhibition was planned in one of the main and conservative museums in Russia, the Tretyakov Gallery, and was supposed to be a free reconstruction of Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov's "complex Marxist exhibition", created in an imaginary future after the proletarian revolution. However, the beginning of street protests raised the question of the value of a purely research and speculative project. As a result, an educational stand was placed in the center of the exposition explaining how non-hierarchical assemblies are held in the Moscow Occupy Abay camp, as well as a manifesto of requirements developed in it. Thus, the real efforts of the protesters were inscribed in the imaginary history of emancipatory proletarian (often amateur and folk art) as the crown of creative activity, overcoming the boundaries of art and life. 
Boris Groys in his text "Becoming a Meteorite" writes the following about the project: "In the museum one begins to understand that, as stated by Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” The goal of Arseniy Zhilyaev’s Museum of Russian History is precisely to reveal the commonality of the medium behind the individual messages that circulate in the contemporary Russian media space. Thus, this project aims to musealize contemporaneity and to let its language, its medium carry its own message." The version shown in San Francisco some month later, which coincided with the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, included a chapter criticizing Russia's imperialist aggression. The project's title M.I.R.: Polite Guests from the Future used an ironic reference to the Russian troops involved in the occupation. 
In 2014, during the conference "Setting as Spatial Strategy" dedicated to an exhibit "A Story of Two Museums: An Ethnographic Exhibition" at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Zhilyaev met the "former Yugoslav artist" Goran Đorđević (who was working at that time as a technical assistant at the Museum of American Art in Berlin), as well as David Hildebrand Wilson from the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. The methodology of de-artization of art, considering it as a special type of human activity rooted in the capitalist mode of production, applied by the Museum of American Art (МоАА), seemed close, from the point of view of Zhilyaev, to the method of the Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov sociological school. This fact led to a long-term fruitful cooperation and in particular to a joint exhibition of the Center for Experimental Museology and MoAA, Berlin Moscow Diaries. The project focused on the diaries of Walter Benjamin and Alfred Barr, who visited the capital of the young Soviet state in the 1920s. Their non-meeting, according to the organizers, led to the birth of two versions of the development of art. One was embodied in the canon of Western modernism designed by Alfred Barr for a display at the MoMA in New York. The second formed the basis of the avant-garde model of art by Walter Benjamin, which transcends the boundaries of institutions. In addition the exhibition reconstructed the Kazemir Malevich room in the "Cubism and Abstract Art" show at MoMA, curated by Alfred Barr, and a Moscow display of the artist's works at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1920s by Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov. 
Acquaintance with the work of David Hildebrand Wilson contributed to the emergence of Zhilyaev's interest in interpreting the museum in the philosophy of Russian cosmism and Nikolai Fedorov. One of the rooms of the Museum of Jurassic Technology's exhibition in the New York dealt with this issue. Thus starting from 2014, Zhilyaev has been making projects dedicated to the critical perception of the topic. As part of a joint venetian exhibition with Mark Dion Future Histories he showed a dystopian museum of the life origin organized on planet Earth after humanity has spread in outer space. In its halls, one could see "folk crafts" from different parts of the "intergalactic empire" of the Russian Space Federation, and in a souvenir shop it was possible to order a "vintage" body for the resurrection "Yuri-1" (based on the anatomy of Yuri Gagarin).Since the late 2010s, the artist has turned to the study of time by means of LARPing and instuction-based art. His Monotony of the Pattern Recognizer, according to Valentin Diaconov, "seems to position itself as the first, last, and only museum of this postcapitalist future" where "our laborless descendants may find that going inside will be too much work, and that museums are sites of the unpaid, qualified labor of recognizing and interpreting images."
Zhilyaev is the editor of the anthology Avant-Garde Museology (e-flux, University of Minnesota Press, V-a-c Press, 2015), the co-founder of the Institute for Mastering of Time (with Asya Volodina) and the Institute of the Cosmos (with Anton Vidokle), a follower of the Museum of Museums, Venice and a member of Moscow Art Magazine's editorial board.
Lives and works in Venice.
Category:1984 births
Category:People from Voronezh
Category:Russian people
Category:Voronezh State University alumni
Category:Contemporary artists