Strelka to launch art hubs across Russia

Strelka Institute will be launching a series of state-sponsored contemporary art and culture hubs across the country. The institute, a highly reputable architecture, design and media school in Moscow, will take charge of the project, entitled the Houses of New Culture or ДНК (DNA) in Russian.

The first centre will be built next to the Cosmonauts Museum in Kaluga, a town of 350,000 inhabitants 90km south-west of Moscow. Until the building is complete, Strelka will curate a programme of cultural events and festivals in various locations around the town including a festival of internet documentary films and an exhibition curated by Paola Antonelli from the MoMA in New York.

In attendance at a launch event in Kaluga on Friday were Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Surkov and Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky along with rAndom International, the British art group behind the Rain Room at the Barbican in London, whose light and sound installation, Future Self (2012), was on display.

In an interview with Gazeta.ru, Alexander Mamut, co-founder of Strelka and owner of UK book chain Waterstones, said: “We want to create an atmosphere that helps us uncover talented, unique people, producing for them a contemporary, well thought through technological environment in which we will first tell them and explain to them how they can be part of the creation of new cultural meanings and objects.”

The second cultural centre will be in Pervouralsk, an industrial town in the Urals, while the third will be opened in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, best known for being the last stop on the Trans-Siberian railway.