02/06/2018
Considering the national importance of the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art and appreciating the work experts have already put in so far, the founders of the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation (LMoCAF) – patrons Ināra and Boris Teterev, Ernests Bernis and Oļegs Fiļs have made the decision to pursue the vision of creating the museum.
The patrons have decided to invest additional funds in the foundation amounting to more than 1 million euros in order to complete the development of design of the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art. It will be done despite the fact that the decision about unavailability of deposits at ABLV Bank, AS heavily affected also LMoCAF by denying it access to the funds meant for the development of the museum and settlement with cooperation partners. In total, the patrons have already invested approximately 3.5 million euros in the development of the museum.
With the additional funding, the LMoCAF will have the opportunity to complete the technical design stage and coordinate approval process with State and municipal institutions, preparing it for the construction phase. The museum development is currently in the last stage of building design, which is created in accordance with the conceptual design conceived by the winner of the international architectural conceptual design competition: the architectural firm Adjaye Associates (United Kingdom) and AB3D (Latvia). More than 30 companies and experts from Latvia, as well as Finland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are involved in the museum design process. Museum building (approcx 8000 m2) will include groups of exhibition spaces, a 200-seat auditorium and utility rooms for performances, concerts, cinema and inter-disciplinary events, educational spaces, a reading room, café, as well as back of house.
The Chairman of the Board of the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation (LMoCAF) Romans Surnačovs notes, “The Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art is the most generous private philantropic initiative in Latvia in the last 100 years. I am delighted that in this complicated situation we can continue work on the development of the museum”.
In accordance with the memorandum of intent signed in 2014, in which the LMoCAF and the Ministry of Culture agreed on the principles of collaboration for the implementation of the vision for the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Ministry of Culture has undertaken to deposit State-owned works in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection for assembling museum exhibitions and to make them accessible to the public in the long term.
From the right: Oļegs Fiļs, Ernests Bernis, Boris Teterev, Ināra Teterev, Sir David Adjaye
