The General Staff building of the State Hermitage was the venue for the intellectual marathon “UNTITLED”

For all their differences, the two exhibitions currently running in the Hermitage do have much in common. First of all, Moscow Romantic Conceptualism and the Italian Arte Povera both emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s and they are conceptually connected with the large-scale creative renewals that swept through world culture after the revolutionary events of May 1968, the 50th anniversary of which falls this year. That specific date became a key point uniting different aspects of the cultural legacy of that time and the perception of them today, which were discussed within the marathon framework.
In keeping with the established tradition, Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, opened the intellectual marathon. He identified a number of topics that were later raised in the discussions. Among other things, while comparing the May 1968 revolution in Paris with events at that same time in the USSR and Egypt, he stressed that “history is a complicated business, many things look different from a distance and what seemed to overshadow all the remaining events back then was in actual fact a part of the general historical situation.” By way of an example, the Director read two poems by Alexander Gorodnitsky reflecting that writer’s perception at different periods in time: Molière from 1968 and Informer’s Day from 2018, noting that they reflect the questions in which “politics, recollections of politics and history” are connected.
Pavel Krasovitsky, the chief researcher of the 1968.Digital (Moscow) project, continued the topic of an interchange between eras raised by Mikhail Borisovich with the presentation of a documentary serial of the same name devoted to that complex year in world history, packed with important political and cultural events, in an up-to-date form aimed at the young generation.
Four important discussions brought together leading Petersburg and Moscow historians, philosophers, art scholars, artists, directors and researchers of the cinema and theatre. 
The first discussion – “May 1968. 50 years: The History. The Consequences. The Perception in Russia and the world” – was devoted to the events of 1968, their influence on socio-political life, the ambiguity and differences in the assessment of this important political and cultural phenomenon in Russia and in the world. The moderator for the discussion was the well-known commentator and historian Vitaly Dymarsky. The participants were the prominent St Petersburg historians and critics Lev Lurye, Nikita Yeliseyev and Stanislav Savitsky, and guests from Moscow – the political theorist Ilya Budraitskis and the philosopher and journalist Kirill Martynov.
The participants in the second discussion, devoted to the reaction of Western and Russian topical art to the events of 1968, were artists and art scholars. The popular Muscovite artists Dmitry Gutov and Anatoly Osmolovsky expressed their view of the issue along with the prominent art scholars and curators Arkady Ippolitov, Ilya Doronchenkov, Olesia Turkina and Andrei Fomenko. The moderator for this round table was Dmitry Ozerkov, head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Contemporary Art.
The third discussion – “Revolution/Reaction. The revolutionary ideas of 1968 and their influence on philosophical and critical thinking” – brought together professional philosophers, lecturers at St Petersburg State University and the European University: Arteny Magun, Alexander Pogrebniak, Yoel Regev and Valery Savchuk. The moderator for the discussion was Boris Kliushnikov, philosopher, curator and teacher at the Rodchenko Art School (Moscow).
The last section of the discussion block in the marathon was connected with experimental cinema and theatre. Grigory Kozlov, director and artistic head of the Masterskaya theatre, and Marina Dmitrevskaya, a theatre scholar and editor of the Petersburg Theatrical Magazine, discussed how the theme of the 1968 revolution was reflected in contemporary theatre and whether those events changed the language of theatrical art. The cinema historian Olga Davydova spoke about the most important films of that time, which still retain their relevance today.
In parallel with the discussions, the art scholar Gleb Yershov and the artists Dmitry Gutov and Anatoly Osmolovsky conducted tours of the exhibition “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone will be Taken into the Future” as part of the programme “An Individual OIpinion”.
At midnight, the first courtyard of the General Staff building became the setting for the theatricalized performance “Everything like among people” given by the SDVIG Performance Studio and Plastic Theatre. In their project the group addressed the issue of co-existence and tried to rethink the possibility of the freedom of the self in conditions of inevitable collectivity.
In the second courtyard Ladomir Zelinsky (GhostNoir) and the saxophonist Alex Zander presented a DJ-set. Hauntology FM is a musical show with live improvisation on the theme of the subjective taste of eventfulness, the end of music and the end of history.
Throughout the marathon the third courtyard of the General Staff building was turned into a large exhibition space for the presentation of projects by young artists that had won the competition “Interventions: Follow Instructions or Don’t”. From among the large number of entries submitted, performances and installations were chosen that put forward the most integral, witty and unexpected statements relating to the interpretation of the language of conceptual and impoverished art today.
By tradition, the intellectual marathon, which is held with the active participation of the staff of the Department of Contemporary Art, ends with a reading from Homer’s Iliad by Dmitry Ozerkov in the Atrium of the General Staff building. On this occasion, though, the finale took place in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace, by Giuseppe Penone’s sculpture Ideas of Stone – 1372 kg of Light.