Pontus Hultén and Museum Revolutions on the Territories of Moscow and St. Petersburg

The experience of the exhibitions Moscow–Paris, 1900–1930 (the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 1981), The Territory of Art and Atelier (the State Russian Museum, 1990), curated by Pontus Hultén, is addressed in this essay in relation to the context of the most recent developments in museology, to a large extent shaped by Claire Bishop’s book Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2014). The author points out that the social engagement of the contemporary museum depends on the temporality of its audience, which is noticeable when considering examples of the Russian curatorial practice from 1990 to 2010. The function of the museum, the author argues, is not only to serve today’s interests of social groups, being the ‘meeting’ point of artists and the public, but also consciously to transform the present, working mainly with the artistic potential, that is, with the creative energy of the time accumulated in artworks, as it was done by Pontus Hultén in the exhibition Moscow–Paris.