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LW: The exhibition also includes a full-scale recreation of an apartment designed for communal
living. Please can you tell us more about this concept?
JM: It is an idea of the future. It is an enlargement of a model by El Lissitzky that was not actually
implemented. It marks the high point of international modernist links as well, because the project
for the Palace of the Soviets was rising at the same time in reality and that is another world. So
we are building the apartment life-size, although it is not liveable. A key element of this exercise is
the idea that there are two histories of Russian Art. There is the Western one and the Russian one,
stemming in part from the division that separated East from West, even before the Iron Curtain.
I think you could go again and again to the exhibition and, at this point, I really must thank the
Russian museums and collectors for their co-operation in putting the exhibition together.
INTERVIEW
