4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

December 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

Various Venues, Moscow

23 September – 30 October

By Astrid Mania

Audiences of international biennials have certainly been invited to a number of unusual locations over the years, ranging from lofty palaces to oppressing prison cells. At the 2011 Moscow Biennale, they can add another kind of venue to the list by taking a perfume-scented passage through Tsum, a luxury department store that sports an art foundation-cum-exhibition space. This is almost too perfect a setting for a comment on the vanity fair that is the artworld. Yet curator Peter Weibel does something else: having given his exhibition the title Rewriting Worlds – inspired by the 2009 Venice Biennale, Making Worlds – he presents at Tsum a baffling combination of media-driven and globalism/politics-focused work. Works like Ahmet Oğüt’s terrorism-inspired installation River Crossing Puzzle (2010) are united with Rebecca Horn’s Moon Mirror Journey (2011), a 72-minute video retrospective of her own work, or Casey McKee’s academic-style paintings, which are almost uncanny meditations on the effects of our global market economy.

The other main venue, the ARTPLAY Design Center, hosts bigness, in terms of names and works alike. Here you have artists like Neo Rauch, Richard Hamilton and Stan Douglas. There are art-and-science fusions; superficial plays on communications technology like Daniel Canogar’s glowing cave of electric cables, Scanner (2009); and a number of works recalling the 1990s wave of mapping-related shows, with their globes and geopolitical charts. Quite a few of the roughly 80 artists in the biennial are from Russia, ranging from conceptual art veterans Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina, with their contemplations of Russian philosophy and art, to the young Alina Gutkina, who records the troubled state of her generation in photographs and video. This is a mixed bag of a biennial that seems to brace itself for the ‘yep, got it’-style visit, for the quick eye that wants the bold and simple, the sensations, reflections and visual plays. In a sense, Tsum’s consumerist allure delivers the perfect metaphor for it.

Still, the Moscow Biennale comes with a large number of special projects that in many cases are more rewarding, at least (and hopefully not only) to a foreign visitor. The group show Art Against Geography, for instance, curated by Marat Guelman and Elena Olejnikova, features about 30 artists living and working outside Moscow. Forming part of a larger undertaking to strengthen cultural life beyond the capital, this is perhaps better at demonstrating good intentions than good works. Still, it is an intriguing insight into artistic activities beyond the market-driven surfaces promoted by many commercial galleries, both in their premises and at the coinciding fair, Art Moscow.

One definite highlight is the ‘historical’ exhibition The Five MANI Folders, with ‘historical’ referring to the last part of the twentieth century. In Soviet times, in an attempt to safeguard and disseminate unofficial art, artists like Andrei Monastyrski, Vadim Zakharov, Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov compiled handmade folders containing small artworks, notes, documents and photographs by themselves and their fellow artists. They came in editions of five – anything issued in higher numbers would have been considered propaganda and attracted the attention of the KGB. Now, all of the five folders ever made are on common display at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation. These are compelling time capsules, archaeological finds almost; but in the face of revived censorship in Russia, this show also feels almostuncannily contemporary.