Vadim Kruglikov | Montenegro museum of local lore

I must confess that I have nothing against Montenegro or Montenegrins. And all this material exhibited by me is a simpleton’s folly, and has no informational value whatsoever. It has no more to do with actual Montenegro than with any other country. In any country there are plenty of people who like to build grandiose edifices of their worldview based on myths. At the forefront of all these imposing intellectual constructions are usually those dedicated to people like us, the crème de la crème. As long as it does not become the main tendency, it’s just a funny and harmless jest. But when it does, then we see something happening like it is in Russia today, for example. So maybe this is an exhibition more about Russia, in fact. And the use of Montenegrin source material is just for the very simple reason that the exhibition was made here, and also because sometimes the most direct line of thought does not take the shortest physical route. Jonathan Swift, for example, used imaginary countries to convey all his grievances about England.
So my exhibition’s value is not in the information it presents, but in the concepts. And concepts — there are aplenty, conveyed with simple and accessible languages of which too, there are many — all friendly and good-natured in manner. Periodically, a slightly bemused fan of all things elegant and sublime will run into some things that absolutely cannot be interpreted within this paradigm. I have done this intentionally in order to make them suffer and deprive them of the intellectual peace that they should only dream about. Because confrontation with contemporary beauty must be a torturous mental labour, not leading to any useful results, causing anguish, and the desire to get blind drink.