Hermitage Museum’s Contemporary Art Chief Quits over Russia’s War in Ukraine
Dimitri Ozerkov, who considering that 2007 has led the up to date art office at the Condition Hermitage Museum in Moscow, has stepped down from his function there in protest of Russia’s violent and ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Ozerkov introduced his departure in an Oct 2 Instagram submit, showcasing a manipulated graphic of a glowing airplane emergency exit signal, in which he averred that he was leaving because “I really do not intend to have nearly anything in typical with today’s Russia.”
Ozerkov uncovered that he designed the determination to go away in March, shortly just after Russia started its aggressive foray into Ukraine, and in the rapid wake of an posting in the govt-operate Russian newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta in which Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky accused the West of making an attempt to cancel Russia around the country’s warmongering.
“After Russia sent its troops to Ukraine,” Ozerkov wrote, “dialogue and regard ceased to imply everything in Russia, the news were changed by propaganda that states nothing about Russian armed forces to be accused of a lot of crimes towards the civilian inhabitants. As a Russian citizen I saw this disgrace as my possess fault also and I shared this feeling. Then my selection was to stop carrying out anything at all in and for today’s Russia.”
Ozerkov, who specializes in eighteenth-century and present-day artwork, arrived to the Hermitage in 1999 as curator of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century French prints. While at the establishment, he arranged much more than forty exhibitions, such as these showcasing perform by Chuck Close, Jan Fabre, Antony Gormley, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and Anselm Kiefer. In 2011 and 2015, he oversaw the Hermitage Museum’s assignments for the Venice Biennale, respectively presenting the perform of Dmitry Prigov and the Gothic glass-themed show Glasstress 2015 Gothika.
Ozerkov also quit the St. Petersburg Town Council for Society. “I salute all for whom the Greek phrase Exodus, made use of by the writers of the Septuagint, has grow to be the only probable way out of the present-day problem,” he wrote, concluding, “Russia squeezed out all of us who desired practically nothing but superior to its lifestyle.”
