Moscow Crimean shore - Central House of Artist

ifa-Galerie Berlin Linienstr. 139/140 10115 Berlin Germany (city map) Send E-mail tel +49 (0)30 28 44 91 40 www.ifa.de

The exhibition "Plan Cabinet Moscow – Places of
a Capital" shown at the ifa gallery Berlin is the first in a series of exhibitions called "CITY VIEWS", in which the ifa galleries in Stuttgart, Berlin, and Bonn will explore different aspects of mega cities, using Moscow, Lagos, and Istanbul as examples. It will approach the fields of architecture, city planning, and urban culture from an architectural, sociological, aesthetic, and communications point of view, considering the respective cultural landscapes.

The exhibition "Plan Cabinet Moscow – Places of a Capital", conceived by the Russian architect Sergei Tchoban, who lives in Germany, offers a comprehensive view on the historical and current developments in Moscow and shows how social conditions and political power structure influence the development of the city. Five prominent places in Moscow exemplarily show the enormous changes this city underwent in its eventful history. The exhibition presents examples of the organization of public and private life, the townscape, architecture, and styles from different periods, especially from the 20th century.

Maps, drawings and photos of completed and unrealized projects, forgotten projects and those which have become classical, show the visitor in a cross section how the city's appearance changed over time, which buildings and which fantastic or less fantastic plans occurred, vanished, and re-emerged.

Using historical material, the exhibition takes up current debates in the context of urban development and city planning, providing the visitor with the possibility to work with the material, enabling her to independently acquire knowledge from the material prepared for this exhibition. Instead of neutral summaries and diagrams, this kind of approach moves the spectator's perspective from the usual bird's-eye view to the horizon of pedestrians and inhabitants of the city, leaving to the visitor the decision which of the realized and unrealized projects have – or would have had – a justification for their existence within the structure of this aggregation.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue of 97 pages, containing texts by Sergei Tchoban, Andrei Gotsak, and six photo reportages by Volker Kreidler, Andrei Yagoubskiy, and Alexei Naroditskiy, published by the Verlagshaus Braun.

In parallel with the exhibition "Plan Cabinet Moscow. Places of a Capital", an accompanying and complementary program of films by young Russian artists will be shown. This program will present videos of performances in the city of Moscow, in which the people in the streets are in the center of interest, and art videos that address the changes in the city. Among others, films by Olga Chernishova, Dmitry Gutov, Maxim Iliukhin, Elena Kovylina, Anton Litvin, Arkadi Nasarov, and Dmitry Vilensky will be presented.