2021

Denis Davydov x Nikolay Koshelev

Exported from Museum

says Nikolai Koshelev of the idea of collaborating with Instigators.

The international independent art group Instigators, which brings together projects in the sphere of contemporary art and blockchains, in collaboration with the artist Nikolai Koshelev (Moscow-New York), presents its inaugural project, for the first time providing the chance to acquire works exported from a museum space with NFT tokens (see below). On April 16, the Instigators art group will hold an auction of four NFT tokens emitted on the Rarible platform. The Ethereum blockchain will be used to issue them.

“This is the first attempt of its kind, whereby we can track the path of a work of art from museum halls to the crypto-world space, in so doing again putting the issue of copies and originals at the cutting edge of discussions,”

The Instigators art group presents its Exported from a Museum project-action, created on the basis of blockchain technologies and NFT (non-fungible tokens) with the artist Nikolai Koshelev. An auction will be held on the 16 of April.

The Exported from a Museum NFT-action is founded on two symbols that are sacral for Koshelev’s authorial poetic – the “Mask-Ank” and the “All-Seeing Skull.” Nikolai, rooting his works in Russian Symbolism, has throughout his creative career worked towards showing his art in the museum alongside the key representatives of that movement – Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Somov and Viktor Borisov-Musatov.

Finding himself with them in the same halls and in the same space, Koshelev asked himself a question:

“What next? What do you do if your works have already found their place? Is that really the end of the road for them?” The artist saw a way out of this conundrum in the possibilities opened up by the digital space, which, recently backed up by NFT tokens and smart contracts, has created the ability for a work of art to go beyond the confines of the obvious “vortex of items in a museum environment.”

“Where does the work actually exist – in a museum or in the code of its digital version, backed up by a synthetic contract? Who is a contemporary artist today, if he’s split between evermore new spaces? What does the portrait of a new collector look like, having developed from the classical framework established by Sergei Tretyakov, if today’s works are freely circulated in their crypto-versions? Our “Exported from a Museum” project, for the first time, raises this wide range of issues in the new circumstances that surround us,” says Denis Davydov, founder of the Instigators project.

The money raised by this project-action will go towards the creation of new projects by the artist and art group, as well as to support the Meet For Charity auction.

Project team

Visualisation and Programming: Dmitriy Kornienko, Eugeniy Padalkin, Kikcha, Alexander Stepanov
PR and Communications: Alyona Solovyova, Ekaterina Privezentseva
Coordinating: Amalia Tumasova
Art Consulting: Andrey Misiano