Large Hadron Collider

Since the 2000s, Nikolay Polissky (1957) builds transitory constructions with natural materials in the countryside and with the help of the population of Nikola-Levinet, a small village about 100 kilometres away from Moscow. For its Habiter cycle, Mudam invited the artist in 2009 to realise an installation of scale for the Grand Hall of the museum, which has since been moved to one of the ditches surrounding it. The artist has filled the Grand Hall with this series of monumental constructions in elm and rush along with the old moat of the fortress on which the museum is built: diverse futuristic machines, recalling power stations equipped with powerful generators from which emerge thick bundles of cables, dwarf the visitor. Through their home-made facturing and rustic aspect, the structures recall old objects from a long popular art tradition while presenting reminiscences of 20th-century Russian modernist and utopian architecture. Marking a shift in Polissky’s pratice, Large Hadron Collider remains a collective venture linked to Nikola-Lenivets where the artist and his team collected the wood and produced the group of elements before reassembling them at the museum.