Russia's jump-start: despite bureaucratic obstacles and a testy art community, Moscow successfully staged its first international biennial, augmented by 50 satellite shows

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Barbara Pollack

Inaugurating an international art biennial in Moscow at this moment in Russia's history might be considered an act of extreme optimism. Indeed, everyone who attended the opening ceremonies of the exhibition, titled "The Dialectics of Hope," congratulated Joseph Backstein, the biennial's organizer and point man in the Ministry of Culture, for merely pulling it off, given the obstacle course of Russian bureaucracy. (Backstein is currently coordinating curator and deputy director of the State Centre for Museums and Exhibitions ROSIZO and director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow.) It seemed surprising to many, even startling, that he had secured two prestigious venues, the Lenin Museum and the A.V. Shchusev Museum of Architecture, and managed to install most of the works--though just barely--before the doors opened on the night of Jan. 27.

Coordinated by a team of international curators that included Rosa Martinez, Daniel Birnbaum, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Iara Boubnova, "The Dialectics of Hope" ostensibly considered the theme of utopia in a society still recovering from the broken promises of Communism, even as it places its faith in a capitalist future. The current mood in Russia, however, is not very hopeful. Artists, like other citizens, face deepening economic hardships due to an overheated real-estate market and severe cutbacks in social programs, as well as an increasing curtailment of civil liberties. Corruption, crime and terrorism have overtaken Russian society to such a degree that in early January the national press renamed President Putin--who ran as the "president of hope"--the "president of hopelessness." Backstein predicted that there would be protests outside the biennial by pensioners upset over contemporary art invading the sacred Lenin Museum; a pensioners' demonstration indeed took place on the day of the opening, but the participants were upset over Putin's announcement of the termination of retirement benefits to millions of elderly Russians, not the artworks inside the museum. In this climate, it seemed more than a little idealistic to believe that a biennial, or any art exhibition, could inject a note of optimism into the bleak Russian winter.

When plans for the biennial were first announced in early 2004, its premise appeared to be to bring major art talents from around the globe to Moscow, and the wish list included such prominent figures as Maurizio Cattelan and Damien Hirst. The final version consisted of 41 artists, mostly newcomers, whose names (which did not include either Cattelan or Hirst) were revealed just two weeks before the opening. Given the dangers of shipping valuable artworks into the country, video and film dominated the exhibition, with submissions from Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller and Hugo Boss nominee Yang Fudong topping the list. Only 15 percent of the participants were from Russia, and most of them came from a select group--locals call them "the Moscow art mafia"--who last summer supported Backstein in ousting from the organizing committee Viktor Misiano, editor of Moscow Art Magazine and the original promoter of the event.

The Lenin Museum

Political history was inescapable at the main biennial venue, the Lenin Museum, located steps away from Red Square. The museum, closed since 1991, retains emblems of the Communist era, such as the hammer-and-sickle patterns and profiles of Lenin that are embossed on the interior moldings of the galleries. Backstein underscored the context by devoting a capacious gallery on the ground floor to a projection of Mikhail Romm's 1958 Lenin Is Alive, a propaganda film about the Revolutionary leader, with footage from 1917 to 1924. "Of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema," stated Lenin shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in 1917, demonstrating his recognition of the power of the medium as a tool for propaganda and re-education. The dualities of film--as a means of personal expression vs. mass communication, or as a site for assembling a community of viewers vs. an audience of alienated individuals--was a key theme in many of the contemporary works on view.

At the opposite end of the museum's ground floor, Cao Fei's installation Father (2005), with film and sculptural components, presented a savvy counterpoint to the alluring nostalgia of Lenin Is Alive. Interviewing her own father, a sculptor who worked for many years in a Socialist Realist style, Cao traces his history from the Cultural Revolution to the present. Though he is now living in Canada, in the film he is seen as still benefiting from the post-Communist tourist boom in China that has made his sculptures of revolutionary leaders even more popular than they were in the first place. The 128-minute film, showing the 72-year-old sculptor reflecting on the irony of his recently enhanced economic status, was projected above a tabletop display of 100 small replicas of his 2004 monument to Deng Xiao Ping, which had been commissioned by a provincial Chinese government, though he was no longer living in the country. Bronze miniatures of the sort are now exchanged as presents among Party leaders.