Buro 17 initiated and organized the exhibition Unconditional Love in Venice alongside the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. Buro 17 is a team of professionals engaged in organizing largescale cultural and social events. Projects and exhibitions to date include the Rozamira cultural cross-section forum, the Russian ACT cultural festival in London, the Norman Foster retrospective exhibition at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, an exhibition of early works by Andy Warhol at the MMOC, and a citywide Museum Night, visited by over 600,000 people just to name a few.
We believe that art is capable of changing a city and affecting public consciousness. Some of Buro 17’s projects actively seek to engage the public sphere and enter the social fabric, such as Paint Moscow, in which leading street artists from a variety of countries turned an average block of Moscow flats into a work of art. Bold artistic initiatives can change a town’s reputation and generate interest around the world. We are doing our best to turn Moscow into one of the art world’s capitals.
One of Buro 17’s focuses is education and discourse. We hold open lectures and master-classes for students, both by speakers from Russia and from abroad. Previous guests have included Norman Foster, Robert Wilson and Marina Abramovic.
Our mission is to change the world for the better, so many of our projects are future-oriented. For this reason, Buro 17 is supporting the children’s charity foundation Spirituality for Kids (SFK), an organization that gives free lessons at schools and orphanages.
Alexandrina Markvo Head Of Company
A graduate of Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics and the International School of Marketing and Management in Hague, Markvo has already worked as a model, as an actress, as a TV show presenter, as a publisher of magazines and as a film and theater producer; however, since then she has chosen a path that allows her to utilize as many of her past experiences as possible, having dedicated herself to the organization of large scale cultural projects that could be used to build a serious museum collection of contemporary art. She came up with the concept of Unconditional Love, an exhibition running parallel to the 53rd Venice Biennial, and brought it to realization, making it her curatorial debut.
Markvo is in love with life, and she thinks it's important to be aware of yourself in every moment of it.
