IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art

A time for Dreams

June 26 – August 10, 2014

Curator: David Elliott

Theme

With the title A time for Dreams David Elliott emphasizes the chronic instability of our time and the acute need for the young generation to have dreams, hopes and opportunities, to not blindly go with the flow but to invest their strength into the perfection of the world:

“Martin Luther King was an activist, idealist and optimist; the words of his epoch making speech I Have a Dream galvanized the cause of Civil Rights in the USA and echoed throughout the world. The tragic sacrifice of his assassination in 1968 meant that there could be no turning back, yet this and many similar examples of inequity and oppression are still not fully resolved. Compared with the certainties of morality and ethics, the compromises of life and politics seem frustratingly weak.

Action and courage, reflection and idealism are integral parts of any dream. Indeed, the indigenous people of Australia and many other parts of the world regard the dream as a map of both reality and the spirit that guides and guards an individual through life.

For this fourth edition of the International Biennale of Young Art in Moscow I have chosen the title A Time for Dreams in acknowledgement of the chronic precariousness of our own times and the urgent need for the dreams and visions of younger and future generations to break the impasse of ‘things as they are’ to make things better.

Good art can reveal unexpected relationships and truths. It demands of the artist a position and perspective on reality and the future, the ability to see, analyze and experience as well as to dream. The dreams that young artists express may be of many kinds: utopian or nightmarish, cynical or hopeful, hot or cold, wet or dry, fast or slow, constructive and, to make the space to build something better, destructive of that which is destructive itself.

A Time for Dreams will include the work of over a hundred artists under the age of thirty five chosen from across the world. Focusing on both present and future, moving between concern with microcosms and universes, this exhibition will resound as a polyphony of individual perspectives interwoven by different aesthetic and cultural traditions. Just as in Martin Luther King’s still unfulfilled dream, the dream of good art, however it is made and wherever it comes from, has to be rooted in truth, ethics and belief in life.”

David Elliott

Curator

David Elliott, curator, author and museum consultant. From 1979 to 1996 he was the head of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (England), and then the museum of Modern Art in Stockholm (Sweden). Between 1996 and 2001 David Elliott was the founder and director of the Mori Museum of Art in Tokyo (Japan), from 2001-2006 Elliot was the first director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (Turkey). In 2007 he became the main curator of the Sydney Biennale (Australia). In 2008 he took up the position of professor of art history at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany). He was then invited to be the main curator of the First International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Kiev (Ukraine), from 2011 to 2012 he worked as a consultant in the Centre for Contemporary Arts CPS Project in Hong Kong, and since 2008 he has been a visiting professor of museum studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong.