Emphasizing Creativity, Not Collectivity

The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design: "The old Lenin Museum reopened to the public on Jan. 28 after more than 11 years of gathering dust, and what was inside would surely have shocked the apparatchiks who once so carefully cultivated Lenin's legacy.

The museum, steps from the Kremlin and Red Square, opened its musty halls as the main site for the first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, a monthlong festival intended to establish the city - and Russia generally - as an international center for the latest in art.

The festival, the first of its kind since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, features artworks by 41 artists from 22 countries, with a heavy emphasis on video, photography and installations. In conjunction with the biennial, more than 25 special projects have opened in museums, galleries and, in homage to the underground artists of Soviet times, in apartments across the city.

Russia's Culture Ministry organized the biennial (and chose the Italian title biennale, underscoring its inspiration in Venice), and contributed $1.5 million of a $4.3 million budget, which included money from the city and some, mostly foreign, corporate sponsors.

But the federal government and prominent Russian corporations that might have been sponsors have kept the festival at arm's length, evidently uncertain of official reactions. This reflects the growing fear of political controversy in a country where an art exhibition mocking the Russian Orthodox Church was violently shut down by protesters in 2003, only to have criminal charges filed not against the protesters, but against the show's organizers. The Russian culture minister, Aleksandr S. Sokolov, did not appear at the biennial's opening party on Jan. 27, sending a deputy instead. Some of the works certainly are discomfiting. David Ter-Oganyan of Russia, who last year won the country's Black Square art prize, salted various corners of the Lenin Museum with melons, jars and other objects affixed with tape and timers - creating disturbing encounters in a country that has suffered dozens of terrorist bombings stemming from the war in Chechnya.

In a work called "Metamorphosis," Aleksei Kallima, a Russian from Chechnya's capital, Grozny, transformed the hammer and sickle into a jarring fight between a uniformed soldier and a man in Chechen garb.

More playful political commentary comes from Vyacheslav Misin and Aleksandr Shaburov, two Russians known collectively as the Blue Noses. Their work projects video images into open cardboard boxes. One shows the familiar image of Lenin's body lying in state. He then coughs and rolls over in a restless sleep.

The two men's more pointed political works are included not in the main biennial but in one of the special projects, a group show called "Russia 2," organized by the Marat Guelman Gallery in the Central House of Artists here. They and other artists mock President Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church and other figures of post-Soviet politics and society.

Mikhail Y. Shvydkoi, the former culture minister, who originally backed the idea of the biennial and is now head of the ministry's Agency on Culture and Cinematography, said at the news conference before the opening that there were no limits on content. The biennial is called "Dialectics of Hope," and its organizing principle is the far from resolved artistic conflict between Russia and its Soviet past. Even the choice of the Lenin Museum reflects that tension.

Russians make up only a fraction of the artists represented. Prominent foreigners include Jeremy Deller of Britain, who won the Turner Prize last year for a video work, "Memory Bucket: A Film About Texas," that included a visit to President Bush's favorite diner in Crawford, Tex., and Bill Viola, the American artist, whose 1995 video "The Greeting," depicting an encounter among three women, is now being shown at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts."

Sophia Kishkovsky and Joyce H. Man contributed reporting for this article.