Vitaly Komar’s Ruins: When AI Dreams of Museums in Decay

Vitaly Komar is no stranger to dismantling artistic institutions—both conceptually and, in his latest exhibition, quite literally. Ruins, opening this month at Guelman und Unbekannt in Berlin, is his first foray into AI-generated art, a genre that has become as divisive as it is inevitable. The exhibition, curated by longtime collaborator Marat Guelman, presents a haunting vision of major museums—MoMA, the Louvre, the Hermitage—crumbling into ruin, their celebrated facades overtaken by time, entropy, and artificial intelligence’s detached imagination.

If Komar’s name sounds familiar, it should. As co-founder of Sots Art—a Soviet-bred hybrid of Socialist Realism and American Pop—he, alongside Alexander Melamid, spent decades skewering propaganda and questioning the permanence of artistic dogma. They painted Stalin with as much irony as Warhol did Marilyn, poking at the absurdity of state-sponsored aesthetics. And now, with Ruins, Komar turns his attention to the institutions that once housed and legitimized those very works. The result? A series of AI-rendered post-apocalyptic visions that look eerily plausible.

“AI doesn’t know nostalgia,” Komar says in his artist statement. “It only calculates probability. But sometimes, probability looks like prophecy.”

It’s a striking concept—letting machines, those ultimate agents of modernity, forecast the downfall of our cultural monuments. The images themselves feel like a cross between Piranesi’s imagined prisons and Google DeepDream: impossibly intricate, unsettlingly familiar, somewhere between the past and an algorithm’s best guess at the future.

For Marat Guelman, the exhibition isn’t just about technological experimentation. “There’s a poetic justice in Komar using AI to deconstruct institutions that once determined the artistic canon,” he notes. “Sots Art challenged ideology. Ruins challenges permanence.”

Komar has touched on this theme before. In his Post-Art series, he depicted classic paintings as ancient, eroded frescoes—a speculative history where Rothko was discovered like Pompeii. In Ruins, AI accelerates the process, showing entire museums undone by time and circumstance. And while it’s tempting to see these images as dystopian, they also serve as a reminder that no cultural institution, no matter how grand, is immune to the forces of history.

Of course, the irony is unavoidable: Komar, once blacklisted in the USSR, now has an exhibition that may one day be housed in the very institutions it envisions in decay. Will AI eventually consume art history, too? That’s a question Ruins asks but does not answer.

One thing is clear: if the museums of the future do fall into ruin, AI will be there to document it—pixel by pixel, glitch by glitch, like an archaeologist of the unreal.

Vitaly Komar’s Ruins runs from February 1 – 9, 2025, at Guelman und Unbekannt, Berlin.