Новый Ангеларий

Books / Monographs / Albums Exhibition catalogues

Moscow: 2007.
Introductory word by Vasily Tsereteli.
28 × 28 см
333 pages.
ISBN 978-5-91611-005-0

In September 2007, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art exhibited the “New Angelarium” project. The project curators Ivan Kolesnikov and Sergei Denisov followed the course of the “Art Constitution” project, their earlier brainchild. Started from the classical understanding of a book as a symbiosis between the text and picture, the authors transformed the artists’ loose interpretation of the given subject into the visual anthology of the Russian contemporary art. Artworks of the participants are arranged in the book in alphabetical order of their given names instead of being sorted by their last names that is more usual in the Russian language. Since the given name refers to the guardian angel of the person, who bears the name.

The book is composed like a geocentric model, lasting one earth day (24 hours = 1440 minutes), which is divided into 10-minute intervals that indicate double-page spreads. There are 144 of them and each spread is occupied with an author and his guardian angel. The all are set between two midnights of the northern and southern parts of the sky, where star angels (correlation of angels and celestial bodies is an ancient semiotic tradition in Judaism, Christianity and Islam) group into the contemporary “Angelarium”. Each angel plays his own song on the trumpet, and an author with his inimitable opinion of the subject, unique and unmistakably recognizable like fingerprints, is behind each of them.