The British Council is happy to announce one of the seven winners selected for the Curatorial exchange programme 2011: ALISA SAVITSKAYA has won the internship in the United Kingdom!

In October 2011 under support of the British Council Alisa will attend Frieze art fair, participate in the projects developed by Visiting Arts and will be placed with Turner Contemporary  gallery for three weeks in Margate, Kent.

After completing the internship, all the curators will come together for a final conference.

We congratulate the winners and hope that the internship will meet their expectations, as well as experience and knowledge gained in leading museums and galleries of contemporary art will be the basis for future curatorial projects and a collective exhibition in 2012!

Alisa Savitskaya: «Everything is new for me: the participation in such contests, the victory and the visit to the UK. This precisely explains why everything was so easy... You will say that is beginners’ luck, but now, when I have already won, I should confess I have deserved that. Because I am young and I am a curator who the contest was held for. I don’t like to be “a young curator”, because there is lack of knowledge and skills while experience is only a hindrance. I am really looking forward to my trip to the UK to feel myself again not so much “a curator” as “young”.

It is vital to me to begin again from the ground up: to change topics, to use other methods of work, and just to be in a different cultural and linguistic environment for a while. If this results in a joint Russian-British exhibition, I will just be happy!”

Alisa Savitskaya – a Senior Researcher and a Curator at the Volga region branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts www.ncca.ru since 2009. Co-founder of the annual public award "Caryatid" to support the best women’s initiatives in the field of contemporary art in Russia.

Was born in 1986 in the city of Gorky. Graduated from Volgo-Vyatsky Public Administration Academy in Nizhny Novgorod.

Curatorial Projects:

• 2011: ‘Blizzard’, Arsenal, Nizhny Novgorod
• 2010-2011: ‘Communal Avant-gard’, Center of Culture ‘Ordzhonikidzevsky’, Yekaterinburg Special project of The First Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art
• 2010: ‘Flight Territory’, LLC Airport, Ulyanovsk
• 2009-2010: ‘Three string quartets for one video’, EK-project, Nizhny Novgorod, Grand prix of Sergey Kuryokhin Award for contemporary arts

Russian-European Curatorial exchange programme 2011 is supported by EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture ).

A young generation of Russian curators, not only from Moscow but also from numerous ambitious cultural centres in Russian regions, is working today partly freelance and partly as curators for young talents in institutions. These young people will decisively shape exhibitions and cultural life in the future; they will quickly manage to modernize and develop exhibition centres, biennales and institutions and aim to collect experience in other countries for their own work.

It is a challenge and a chance for the countries of the European Union to support this young generation in their education by offering them unique possibilities to network and gain professional experience at European institutions and festivals.

Furthermore, the programme aims not only to further educational system for young Russian curators but also to build wider links and shared activity in the future between Russian and European contemporary art curators and institutions.

The EUNIC countries involved in the project are Germany, Austria, Sweden, France, Romania and the UK. All members have  chosen institutions in their homelands that are ready to host a Russian curator for approximately 1 month and get him/her involved in a cultural project. These are: Haus der Kunst (Germany), Die Springerin and Tranzit (Austria), Kalmar konstmuseum (Sweden), Centre Pompidou-Metz (France), Anaid Art Gallery (Romania) and Turner Contemporary (the UK). The participating institutions will take up a young Russian curator as an intern.

Read all bout the project on the website http://www.eunic-online.eu/russia