The Art Newspaper
Moscow residents angry about the reconstruction of their neighbourhood have taken a page from the playbook of Western protestors and started a Change.org petition calling on the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art to end its sponsorship deal with the Russian property developer PIK.
Garage was founded by Dasha Zhukova and the billionaire Roman Abramovich, who remain its chief backers, but the museum has recently been expanding its support base. In August, Garage announced a partnership with the PIK Group that provides museum membership cards to new home buyers and highlights their shared commitment to “change lives and spaces for the better” as well as to accessibility for the disabled.
The Russian capital has been in the throes of a massive urban improvement programme called “renovatsiya” run by the city government.
PIK’s construction in the Kuntsevo district of northwest Moscow is not officially part of that, but activists say it has a similar goal of displacing residents from low-rise Soviet-era buildings to make way for profitable high-rises that could be filled with new buyers.
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