Source: HRO.org (info), 16/05/12

A group of Russian artists will follow in the writers’ footsteps by organizing their own public stroll down the boulevards of Moscow on 19 May, Interfax reports.

“From 6 to 9 p.m, as part of the citywide event ‘Night at the Museum,’ viewers will have the opportunity to see unusual and exciting works of modern art right on the boulevards of Moscow,” said co-curator of the “Nomadic Museum of Modern Art,” Yuri Samodurov.

Twenty-five artists plan to wheel their creations on hand carts down the Sretensky, Rozhdestvensky, Petrovsky and Chistoprudny Boulevards, with a possible stop in the courtyard of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art on Petrovka Street if museum authorities grant them permission, according to Grani.ru.

“The artists have decided to act—to go beyond their socially-delineated boundaries within museums and galleries and walk with their creations down the boulevards in order to speak out, not with words but with visual images, about modern-day ills and other issues,” Samodurov said.

Among the expected participants of the “Nomadic Museum” are German Vinogradov, Sergei Yakunin, Nikolai Polissky, Leonid Sokhransky, Viktoria Malkova, Polina Moskvina, Galina Shilina, Elena Munts, Andrei Mitenev, Aleksei Garikovich, Marina Zvyagintseva, Sergei Katran, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev, Mikhail Pogarsky, Valery Korchagin and others. Nearly all the works that will be on display were created by the artists specifically for the three-hour nomadic exhibit.

Participants of the “Nomadic Museum” invited the head of the Moscow Department of Culture, Sergei Kapkov, to kick off “Night at the Museum” with this project. The organizers of the walk hope that Kapkov “will be able to work out potential problems with the city police and the head officers, for whom an outing of artists wheeling their creations down the streets on their own initiative, with nothing but a polite prior notification to authorities, is still a novelty.”

More than 20 thousand people took part in Sunday’s “test stroll,” during which police blocked off the city’s boulevards. According to estimates by the Moscow branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the event attracted one thousand people, with the final estimate adjusted to two thousand people by the end of the walk.

Upon the initiative of writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, a group of writers and their fans gathered at noon on Pushkinskaya Square to walk along the boulevard ring to the statue of writer Aleksander Griboedov at Chistiye Prudy. The event became a response to the mass arbitrary arrests that took place in Moscow during the days surrounding the inauguration of Vladimir Putin.

“The goal of this experiment is simple: to determine once and for all whether Muscovites can walk freely in their own city, or whether they need to have some kind of special permit,” Chkhartishvili wrote in his blog.