On 1 October 2016, a joint project between the State Hermitage and the Dialogues Open Library took place for the first time in the General Staff building.
At the formal opening of the event, Dmitry Ozerkov, the head of the State Hermitage’s Department stated that Dialogues had been invited as a guest of Hermitage 20/21, a project for showing contemporary art in a traditional museum. It too has at its core the principle of dialogue, between old and new art, between architecture and inventiveness, between form and interpretation. The process of dialogue is inherent in culture as such and any opportunity to reflect upon its various aspects is valuable.
The project’s organizer, Nikolai Solodnikov, expressed gratitude to Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, for the opportunity to resume the Dialogues.
The event began with a meeting between the writer Daniil Granin and the Lithuanian dramatist Marius Ivaškevičius. The discussion, given the title “Experience of memory. Leningrad. Molėtai”, became a conversation about the 20th century, a time of great tragedies, an age that forcibly posed the question of the value of human life.
In the dialogue “Art that changed the world” the composer Victor Martynov came together with the musician Kirill Ivanov (from the intelligent dance music group SPBCh), representatives of very different musical milieus that have had a considerable influence on culture in Russia in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Last to appear were the film director and animation artist Garri Bardin and Liubov Arkus, editor in chief of the film magazine Séance that has its 25th anniversary this year. In the dialogue “Sound of the time”, they spoke about people, events and epochs that have shaped the present cultural environment.
