Biennale of contemporary art. Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

At all times, art has united people. It speaks in a language understandable and close to all peoples - the language of images and feelings. Art has an absolutely amazing quality - it helps people communicate and interact without depriving them of their individuality.

The main theme of the 6th Biennale of Contemporary Art, which took place in Moscow this autumn, was the idea of interaction and commonwe alth. “How to live together? A view from the city center in the heart of Eurasia Island” is the name of the forum, which lasted 10 days, perfectly reflects the desire of the organizers and participants through art to comprehend the main problem of the modern world.

Events and people

Biennale is the traditional name for festivals of art and culture. As the name suggests, they are held every two years. The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, the sixth in the last 12 years, has become a significant cultural eventEastern Europe.

The festival was held on September 22 - October 1 at VDNKh, and exhibitions, forums, performances and meetings occupied not only the entire Central Pavilion, but also took place in many exhibition halls and galleries of the capital as part of the "parallel program". In total, about 40 exhibition spaces were allocated for the 6 Biennale of Contemporary Art in Moscow.

Organizers and participants of the festival events

The curators of the project were De Bare from Antwepen, Austrian Nikolaus Schafhausen, head of the Kunsthalle, and Defne Ayas, head of the Center for Contemporary Arts Rotterdam

The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art was established in 2003 by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. It was also organized by FACC and ROSIZO. Starting from the 2 Biennale of Contemporary Art, a specially established art fund joined the organizers, and a little later, the government of the capital.

In the main pavilion of the 6th biennale of contemporary art in Moscow, more than seventy representatives of culture and art, members of the press and critics met. At exhibitions, meetings, discussions, the most important issues of our time were raised, primarily related to the problem of coexistence of cultures.

Projects and guests of the 6th Biennale of Contemporary Art

Along with the basic project, the festival featured programs of guests invited to the forum, for example, Anisha Kapoor from India, Michal Rovner, Evgeny Antufiev, French artist Louise Bourgeois and others.

As part of the "Specialprojects” exhibitions were presented. They took place at different venues in Moscow. The most interesting are the “Wings of Eurasia”, which took place in the Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts. An unusual exposition "Metageography", which presented geographical maps - the work of artists of different times, was deployed in the Tretyakov Gallery. And in the exhibition hall on Kashirka, a bright and spectacular festival “See the Sound” was held.

Interaction in the rhythm of creativity

Are there really those universal human values that were talked about so much in the recent past? This question was a key one in the forums of the Biennale of Contemporary Art. Moscow during the days of the festival has become a huge platform for real cross-cultural research, the results of which were interpreted by guests from a variety of positions.

The seriousness of the approach and the desire of artists to participate in solving the paramount problems of society attracted the attention of representatives of other fields far from painting, sculpture, literature and music: sociologists, economists, historians and political scientists.

Faces of Eurasian Art

Despite the importance of discussions and discussions, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art is primarily a festival of creativity, so the main guests and project participants were artists from different countries of Europe and Asia, and the main events were exhibitions and performances.

Creativityindividual masters and studios from France, Greece, Germany, China, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine and other countries were presented at more than a hundred exhibitions.

Ambiguous and far from always close to the average viewer, contemporary art, however, shocked with its expressiveness, eccentricity and consonance with the problems of our time. In addition, open meetings were organized with artists such as Mayeya van Lempuyt, Suchan Kinoshita, Simon Denis, Burak Arikan, which allowed them to better understand the ideas and thoughts that motivate them to create, in whatever form they are presented.

Art as a process

One could see the work of artists and in the process of creating their works. Artists from Russia, France, China and Ukraine worked in the open areas of the Biennale of Contemporary Art.

So massively direct creative process has never been presented in Russia. This endless, at times seemingly chaotic series of events reflected modern reality in the best possible way. At the same time, the action itself, taking place at the VDNKh venues and beyond, resembled a single colossal performance.

Biennale of Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg

Moscow is not the only Russian city that provides its venues for such public events. In autumn 2015, the third Ural Biennial of Industrial Art was held in Yekaterinburg.

Her main project included two exhibitions dedicated to different aspectsthe concept of "Mobilization", which was understood as the ability to change, the rejection of the obsolete and the transition to a new stage.

These exhibitions were prepared by Biennale curators Li Zhenhua (Beijing) and Bilyana Ciric from Shanghai.

The Yekaterinburg Biennale is not called industrial by chance. It mainly demonstrated art reflecting the problems of the industrial society, and many sites were represented by factories and enterprises of the region, including the Sysert factory of artistic porcelain, the art casting factory of the city of Kasli.

Ural Industrial Festival lasted three months and was held in 10 cities of the region. During this time, the exhibition was visited by more than 100 thousand people. Thus, the inhabitants of the Ural region got the opportunity to get in touch with the beauty, which is hidden in clear lines and concise forms of industrial products.

The Biennale of Contemporary Art, regularly organized in the capital, allows Muscovites to get acquainted with the most interesting and extraordinary figures of European art and present to the world the creations of contemporary Russian artists, sculptors and masters of unexpected performances.