You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred

Exhibition courtesy of Zabludowicz Collection in collaboration with Tamares Real Estate Holdings, Inc.

Curator: Paul Luckraft

Supported by: Mastercard, Tele2.

Press release

You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred
from the Zabludowicz Collection

Curator: Paul Luckraft

Exhibition courtesy of Zabludowicz Collection in collaboration with Tamares Real Estate Holdings, Inc.

With the support of MasterCard, Tele2

The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Zabludowicz Collection and Tamares Real Estate Holdings, Inc. present the exhibition ‘You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred’, from the Zabludowicz Collection. Project realised with the support of MasterCard and Tele2, strategic partners of the museum.

Poju and Anita Zabludowicz are among the most authoritative patrons of art in Europe. The Zabludowicz Collection art space in London opened in 2007 in what was once a 19th-century chapel, and is renowned for its impressive exhibition programme and, most importantly, serves as a unique launch pad, particularly for young artists. Zabludowicz Collection also has a base on the island of Sarvisalo in Finland, running a programme of art residences and exhibiting works from the collection alongside new commissions. More than 3000 works by 600 artists are included in the Zabludowicz Collection.

The MAMM exhibition will feature photographs from the last 40 years, selected from this extensive collection. Among the 14 artists presented are world-famous luminaries such as Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, Richard Prince, Jeff Wall, Christopher Williams, Thomas Ruff and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as young and talented artists who are rapidly gaining recognition, such as Erin Shirreff, Sara Cwynar, Lucas Blalock, Anne Collier, Natalie Czech, Elad Lassry and Sara VanDerBeek.

Many of these names are well known to the Russian public. The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow has already acquainted visitors with the work of Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, and others.

The title of this project, ‘You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred’, was borrowed from a conversation between Jeff Wall and Lucas Blalock that spoke of art as the product of experimentation and mystery. Brought together in this exhibition are works based on diverse conceptual models for understanding the nature of photography as a highly important medium that largely determines our view of the world. The exhibits also demonstrate mutual influence between artists of different generations, working on different continents and in different genres.

In the mid-twentieth century the dominant genre of photography was street photography. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who formulated the principle of the ‘decisive moment’, set a trajectory for the development of documentary photography, which replaced modernism in the early 20th century.

Photography as a means of reflecting the ‘truth’ of life remains a dominant model today. With the advent of mobile phones photography is transformed into a pursuit of the masses and millions of new shots capturing a moment in time are displayed on the web every second. This naturally raises the question of whether photography has been devalued as an art form.

In the late 20th century many artists were already seeking new ways to develop photography, moving away from the principles of spontaneity and authenticity. They placed photography in a dialogue with other forms of visual art: painting, sculpture and cinematography, freely making use of methods for transforming reality already devised in the history of art while taking into account the opportunities provided by new technologies. To achieve the necessary effect of transformation artists employed various techniques, occasionally involving unexpected mises-en-scène, and at times complex manipulation of the actual material of the image.