This review was originally published in March 2005 / No 284, p18-19.

1st Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

Pryle Behrman

In the famous opening passage of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, 1988, in which Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta fall out of Air India's London-bound flight 420, later to be miraculously fished out of the English Channel, Gibreel improvises an English translation of an old Hindi film song: ‘O, my shoes are Japanese ... These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's Indian for all that.' I was reminded of these lines when visiting the 1st Moscow Biennale because, like the protagonist in Rushdie's novel, the exhibition, for all its international pretensions, is unquestionably stronger when it embraces the country in which it was born.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the 'main project' of the Biennale, entitled 'Dialectics of Hope'. It brings together an impressive roster of artists – such as John Bock, Sam Durant, Melik Ohanian, Jeremy Deller and Santiago Sierra – under the curatorship of such blue-chip names as Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, Iara Boubnova, Nicolas Bourriaud, Rosa Martínez and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The idea is undoubtedly to show that Moscow can be one of the big players of the biennale circuit, Venice, São Paulo and Manifesta are frequently mentioned in the exhibition literature, but the artworks on display are often already well known and sometimes even antithetical to the supposedly unifying theme of the Biennale's title. Sierra's Spraying of Polyurethane over 18 People, 2002, for example, which is predicated upon the paid humiliation of prostitutes for the voyeuristic cameras, is far more about a passive, resigned nihilism than any form of active emotion such as hope. The tenuous link to Moscow is presumably that the protagonists were all East European, although there is no suggestion that any of them were from as far east as Russia itself.

The most resonant works in the exhibition are those that have been insightfully chosen to reflect, and be illuminated by contemporary Russian society. Johanna Billing's Project for a Revolution, 2000, restages a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, 1970, in which a gathering of students lounges around while patiently awaiting the start of a political demonstration. In the background, a printer churns out pamphlets that are, in fact, completely blank. You sense that everybody here is avowedly anti-authoritarian – and eager to revolt – yet a rallying cause is missing so nothing actually happens. Billing portrays a sceptical generation that desperately yearns to believe in something, but is too worldly-wise to believe that political dogmas are anything more than empty sloganeering – a paradox which Russia, as a country that strove for a utopian dream for so long while only creating an increasingly dystopian reality, is acutely aware.

In Happy New Year: Memorial Project Vietnam II, 2003, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, who is based in Vietnam, filmed an underwater performance that combined stereotypical elements of his adopted country's history. Images of a dancing aquatic dragon, incongruously supported by a team of scuba divers, are accompanied by a soundtrack of ceremonial drumming, while the title refers to the Tet Offensive, the major attack orchestrated by North Vietnamese troops at the start of the 1968 Lunar New Year. The result of this melange of influences is a languid ballet of considerable beauty. Like Russia, Vietnam is challenging the world to see it as a continually evolving country rather than merely relying on simplistic recollections of its recent political history or an exoticised cultural past.

Alongside the 'main project' there are a further 25 'special projects' in various venues scattered around Moscow, and it is in these additional exhibitions that the Biennale comes into its own. 'No Comment? Art of young Russian artists', which took place inside an old abandoned paper factory, provided an interesting snapshot of how local artists have addressed domestic political crises, rampant capitalism and the emerging mass media. Nikolai Oleinikov's video Showcase, 2005, documents an alphabetically ordered procession of adverts for well-known multinational brands, which are sung operatically within a nondescript shopping mall. It is a perceptively wry comment on the incongruous clash between Old and New Russia as well as providing a nod to art history by referencing John Baldessari's 1972 videotape of him singing, and thus gently lampooning, Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art of 1969. Georgy Pervov's No Comment? Total realism, 2004, on the other hand, is a photographic triptych of (from left to right): a carefully drawn line in the snow, a pair of boys playing nonchalantly with a toy rifle in front of a bullet-riddled brick wall, and an airplane trail in the sky that seems to point inexorably at a streetlamp looming in the foreground. It reads as a filmic storyboard depicting Russia past, Russia present and a technologically advanced (but utterly faceless) Russia of the future.

'Starz' at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art provided the opportunity for an in-depth look at the work of Russian artists who are already well known outside of their native country and included an extended series of Alexander Vinogradov & Vladimir Dubossarsky's mock Socialist Realist canvases. Although there is undoubtedly something very safe about images that rely on vibrantly painted pop culture clichés (you would have to be pretty po-faced not to enjoy them on some level) their ludicrous juxtapositions have enough wit to make them worth an extended look. In Harvest-carrying Feast, 1995, the heroic farmers of many a Stalinist-era Five Year Plan show they are just as adept at organising a nice, wholesome orgy out in the open-air, while in Hot Shop, 1995, a fire-breathing dragon is tethered by muscle-bound factory workers so that it can act as an impromptu furnace for the greater good of Mother Russia's industrial cause.

Oleg Kulik has been a long-standing critic of contemporary Russia and for 'Starz' he has constructed a coop that allows a brood of chickens to nest above a wax figure of Leo Tolstoy and literally shit on his head. He is clearly unimpressed by the unthinking adoration of his country's national icons, preferring instead the earthy honesty of the animal kingdom. Like most of the strongest work in the 1st Moscow Biennale, Kulik's unyielding condemnation of present-day Russia is usually tempered by a humour that reveals an underlying affection. This duality in approach has a long history in Russian cultural life. As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in A Writer's Diary, 1877-1881: 'Judge the Russian people not by the abominations they so frequently commit, but by those great and sacred things for which, even in their abominations, they constantly yearn.'

The first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art was held at various venues throughout Moscow from January 28 to February 28 2005

Pryle Behrman is a curator and critic.

Free Sample Issue
Did you enjoy this article? If so why not request a free copy of Art Monthly? Email your name and address and quote 'AMWeb'.