Every year, the Cosmoscow Foundation acquires works by contemporary artists for the benefit of the museum, declared “Museum of the Year” according to Cosmoscow. The program started in 2017, and during its existence the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Pushkin Museum named after. A.S. Pushkin (Moscow), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moscow), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. In 2022, the Cosmoscow Foundation initiated and allocated funds for the restoration of the total installation of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Red Car” from the collection of the State Hermitage (St. Petersburg).
The Perm Museum of Contemporary Art PERMM became the first museum outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg to receive Cosmoscow “Museum of the Year” status. As part of the Cosmoscow Museum of the Year program, the selected museum gets the opportunity to show its project at the fair; the Cosmoscow Foundation also allocates funds for the purchase of new works of art for the museum’s collection and provides support in organizing joint exhibitions and educational programs, information coverage and the implementation of new projects dedicated to museum activities.
In total, the PERMM collection will be replenished with 23 works of art. Among them are two works by the Perm artistic duo Olga Subbotina and Mikhail Pavlyukevich. These are the installations “URALCHUGUN” (2014) and “Immersion in the coastal zone” (2014). The latter of the two works was presented at the museum at the personal exhibition of Subbotina and Pavlyukevich “Chronicle of Movement” (2014), which became a turning point in the history of PERMM - it was from here that the study of the regional artistic context began in the museum.
Among the selected authors is the artist Asya Marakulina, who was born in Perm, but today lives and works in Vienna (Austria). Asya took part in two PERMM exhibitions - “Shape of the Invisible” (2015) and “Name of Rivers” (2018). The museum’s collection will be replenished with two installations by the artist - “Relaxation Room” (2016 – 2018) and “Rule of the Seam” (2020).
Among the new works in the museum’s collection, painting is represented by the large-scale work “Cycle” (2023) by the young Yekaterinburg artist Liza Nesterova. Lisa was one of the participants in the exhibition “Wild Happiness. On both sides of the Ural Mountains" for the 300th anniversary of Perm and Yekaterinburg, held at the museum in the summer of 2023.
The PERMM collection will include two works by Perm artist Elena Slobtseva - the video installation “Untitled” from the project “Culture of Materials” (2020) and the multimedia installation Steel life (2019). Elena, who works with various mediums - animation and video, installation, art object, performance - is a regular participant in PERMM group exhibitions. In 2020, the museum hosted the artist’s first solo exhibition, “Culture of Materials,” which presented installations made of huge staples and large-scale video installations created specifically for this exhibition.
The Kaliningrad art group “Tender Women” is also well known to PERMM guests. In 2022, the museum hosted the exhibition “She was as beautiful as a Russian landscape.” The collection purchased by the Foundation for the museum will include the multimedia video installation “Carotid Artery” (2020), consisting of 6 videos that were presented at the exhibition at PERMM. The collection will also include 10 graphic works by artist and curator Leili Aslanova (Rostov-on-Don), created in 2019 – 2021.
The PERMM museum collection includes more than 1,500 storage units worth more than 80 million rubles. The heart of the collection is the circle of artists of the “Russian Poor” project (2008) - Alexander Brodsky, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Olga and Alexander Florensky, Vladimir Kozin, Vitas Stasyunas, Nikolai Polissky, Pyotr Bely, Yuri Shabelnikov and others. Approximately a third of the collection is occupied by objects from the Moscow Archive of New Art (MANI). Since 2014, work has been carried out with Perm authors and intensive replenishment of the section of Perm contemporary art.