At the invitation of message salon embassy and Madame l’Ambassadeur Esther Eppstein, the Russian artist duo Gorod Ustinov currently reside in Zurich. Gorod Ustinov’s ongoing project Museum.Delivery explores the possibilities of a museum and brings the idea and experience of the museum into everyday life.
Museum.Delivery is an art service that accepts orders: Gorod Ustinov invents museums, collects artefacts, works of art and creates documents wherever desired (interested parties please contact email hidden; JavaScript is required).
With the statement “the museum is a situation”, Gorod Ustinov situate the museum as an ideal place that can manifest anywhere. Museum Delivery practices and combines various art techniques, creates micro-installations from everyday and found materials, collects works of art by artists who are friends, and creates objects, stories and new museums in workshops and discussions with the audience.
In July, Gorod Ustinov will be on tour with Museum.Delivery in the city of Zurich; at the lido, in the art scene or on Langstrasse, possibly with the “Museum of one Dress” in their luggage: a flowered dress from their Russian hometown of Izhevsk in the Udmurt Republic that will be worn, draped, wrapped, crumpled up or thrown into the air by various people and in different situations. On Instagram, one can follow the dress, cut in a style from the 80s, as a kind of tribute to youth in the post-Soviet Russian province and an homage to their fashionable women and mothers, who often made this kind of dress themselves.
The dress travels with Gorod Ustinov, and wherever the dress is, there is also the “Museum for one Dress”. The dress is not only an artefact with a hidden context, but also a direct and interactive medium, a game and barter between the artists and the party involved.
Gorod Ustinov explore the territory and what the concept of home and rootedness can signify. During their stay in Zurich, they create a “Museum of Langstrasse”. Like archaeologists, Gorod Ustinov excavate from the “Erde der Langstrasse” (“Earth of Langstrasse”). Gorod Ustinov invite artists, city dwellers, neighbours and passers-by to collect artefacts or invent objects in workshops. In the studio of the 25hours Hotel Langstrasse, delicate, fragile objects made of textiles, wood, moss and found materials are created. In the shop window of Die Diele on Sihlhallenstrasse, Gorod Ustinov continuously arrange and expand the artifacts during the first three weeks of their stay.
At the vernissage on 25 July, the shop window “Erde der Langstrasse” will be inaugurated as a new museum in the presence of Gorod Ustinov and the publication message salon embassy Zine No. 17 will be published.
Vernissage Thursday 25 July, 18 to 22 hrs
Exhibition until 18 August 2019
Die Diele, Sihlhallenstrasse 4, 8004 Zurich
message salon thanks: Livio Baumgartner (Die Diele), City of Zurich Culture, 25hours Hotel Langstrasse