"Meret Oppenheim" from the "Museum for Mice" series

The mousetrap has long been the object of attention and the point of application of Vladimir Kozin's creative powers. Twenty-five years ago, he founded the "Mousetrap of Contemporary Art" museum. Then the artist asked his colleagues to use ordinary rodent traps as the basis for his works. The result was a kind of cast of the artistic environment of the late 90s and early 2000s, recording personal connections, stages of creative paths, and types of artistic thinking. The tool for violence against mice turned into an instrument for capturing time, recording changeable memory. Since then, the mousetrap as a medium and as a metaphor have never left Kozin's artistic arsenal.

The new version of this theme, presented to viewers in the form of the "Museum for Mice", also represents a selection of artists, however, this time it includes absolute international classics of 20th-21st century art. Their list is compiled on the principle of personal sympathy - this is the history of art that the author would like to share, take with him to a desert island. Each "big name" is represented in the Kozin pantheon by a mousetrap-homage, sometimes preserving a direct and sometimes associative connection with the heritage or author's style of the star prototype. The artist himself explains his gesture as follows: Russian art, due to material circumstances, lacks scale. The domestic viewer must imagine that he has shrunk to the size of a mouse, so that, looking at giant mousetraps, he can feel the size and grandeur of contemporary art.

The image of a mouse, timidly scratching somewhere behind the baseboard, and, apparently, setting up its own museum there, is revealed from an unexpected side in the new configuration of domestic culture. Contemporary art and, at the same time, all of modernity are returning to themselves the status of a suspicious, semi-underground territory, a risk zone. The heretic mouse, having hung up her homemade contemporary icons, demonstrates a quiet feat of loyalty to the international artistic process. And Damien Hirst's production of gnawed wooden kolobashki in such a situation is not perceived as a cargo-cultural practice or ritual self-spitting. Now it is the most important effort of memory, an act of resistance, preservation and defense of one's system of values. Including spiritual ones.

Text: Alexander Dashevsky