Kathryn Smith Moscow Diary

Kathryn Smith is the only South African-based participant in Qui Vive? II Moscow Biennale of Young Art, which opens in Moscow on July 1. The biennale will present the work of some 500 artists from all over the world, the majority from Russia and Europe, in a number of venues all over the city of Moscow. See http://www.youngart.ru/en/

Context
It was towards the end of 2009 when I received a notice requesting applications for a biennale in Moscow I had not heard of before. Called Qui Vive?, it was to be the second presentation of a biennale of ‘young’ art. I immediately warmed to the title, which means to be on the alert, vigilant; historically equivalent to “To whose party do you belong?'” or “Whose side do you support?” It seemed like the recipe for an interesting collection of work that would have something to say, a position to declare. I made an application without thinking too much about it. I was interested to visit Moscow (who wouldn’t be) and also to think about another version of my project ‘In Camera’ where I could work specifically with the story of Andrei Chikatilo (watch Chris Gerolmo’s haunting film Citizen X before you stumble onto any weird websites).

Some months later I was notified that the project was accepted, and would feature on Darya Pyrkina’s exhibition ‘Glob(E)scape’, to be installed at ArtPlay Design Centre. Some online research attempts did not produce very much, and having to rely on Google Translate to understand the Russian made for some amusing interludes. My communication with the organisers and their assistants was prompt and detailed, but did occasionally end up being a bit confusing, what with technical matters being discussed and translated back and forth between Russian and English. There was to be no support for flights, but the biennale would cover accommodation. Although they also offered to ship works, I wanted to make a new suite of drawings, which would mean carrying them as part of my luggage as their work would not be complete in time. After a pretty terrifying experience in Stockholm last year, presenting the same project (it worked out wonderfully but the communication with the gallery was extremely difficult), I also realised I would have to make what was an extremely hardware-heavy project much more portable and flexible than its previous iteration, and so set about trying to find out who could assist and I was confident that it would be an amazing experience regardless of what could go wrong. The biennale team are very young – in their early twenties – but seem to possess an admirable energy and will and I want to be a part of this.

June 14, 2010
It’s less than two weeks before I am supposed to arrive in Moscow and the promised support for my flight has not yet materialised. And I must still apply for a visa. What to do? Coming very close to cancelling the whole operation, the Dean’s office at the University of Stellenbosch comes to the rescue and I suddenly have a flight. They have never once let me down and I am grateful for such a supportive environment in which to work. The visa is no problem - the biennale have organised it through the Russian Ministry of Culture and the Russian consulate in Cape Town has a telex about my participation, so the process is hassle-free.

June 22, 2010
My flight departs on June 25 (3 days away) and I have just received an email from the biennale to say they have moved my venue to a space called Proekt Fabrika (the Factory Project). I check it out online and it looks great. Instead of staying in a hotel, I will now stay in the residency apartment of the project. This sounds perfect to me. I had never seen images of the other space, so it’s no real problem. The only worry is that I was initially planning a room of 20 sq/m, and this space is now 120sq/m! Fortunately I went a bit mad with the drawings and ended up making them far bigger, and making more, than I had anticipated. Now it seems I will not have to edit them. I still don’t have photographs of the space, only a floorplan, so I cannot see if there are clean walls, windows, or what condition it is in. I have assurance of technical support, but just in case, I pack a mini-toolkit and every conceivable manner of fixing the unframed drawings to whatever surface I can imagine.

June 25, 2010

My flight routing is CT-JHB-Dubai-Moscow on SAA and Emirates. It will take nearly 30 hours to get there in total, with all the airport loitering and connections. Groan. I’m anticipating some interesting conversations with security and ground staff as I need to convince them not to check my drawings (packed in tubes) as luggage, but allow me to carry them on board. SAA is a bit of a struggle, but after a truly Kafkaesque conversation, I eventually persuade them that the packages are more akin to musical instruments than sporting goods, and I’m on my way. Emirates, as always, is a pleasure.

June 26, 2010  

The flight route passes over parts of the Middle East and north over Georgia to Russia. I’m fascinated to watch the landscape shift from flat brown to highly regulated agriculture to forest. [IMAGE from window]

Trying to ignore the rather annoying Slovenian man sitting next to me who is trying to teach me rudimentary Russian vocabulary between bouts of rather violent snoring, I’m reading Vladimir Shubin’s ANC: A View from Moscow (Jacana, 2008) which tracks a fascinating history of South Africa’s liberation struggle via the financial, military and other assistance received from the Soviet Union. Originally published in 1999, Shubin has since followed this up with The ‘Hot’ Cold War, which looks at Soviet involvement in other liberation struggles in Southern Africa. An amusing anecdote tells of a visit to Moscow in 1961 by South African Communist Party General Secretary Moses Kotane, after being away from the city for a quarter of a century. Although he was accompanied by Yusuf Dadoo, Kotane was remembered for his fierce independence. Shubin relates:  “Shortly after his arrival he asked to be taken from his ‘special flat’, provided by the Central Committee, into the centre of Moscow, where he promptly disappeared. Imagine the General Secretary of an illegal party getting lost in Red Square! Fortunately the alarm was called off in a matter of hours: Kotane rediscovered some parts of Moscow after his 25-year absence, took a few rides on the metro and by trolley bus, and then successfully found his way back to his ‘hideout’. (pp.27-28).
 
I’m faced with hideous queues at passport control, and must intuit that I should complete a landing card, in duplicate. Waiting for a driver in the arrivals hall, I’m surrounded by my first glimpses of contemporary Russian fashion, clearly suffering from too many years of no choice, and now faced with too much. Micro-minis and stilettoes fight it out against cheap sandals worn with very short shorts (men) and occasionally socks.
 
Going outside to smoke, the temperature is in excess of 35 degrees and I quickly retreat back into the arrivals hall. My driver is late, stuck in traffic. When we eventually find each other, Michael puts me and the baggage into a rather swish Beamer convertible and tries to explain something rather complicated in Russian, demonstrating the aircon and central locking. What he is trying to say is 'it's really hot, use the aircon while I go and pay for parking and lock the doors after I get out’. Ok then.

The drive into Moscow fully demonstrates two paradoxical features that characterise driving in this city: impressive traffic snarls – even on a Saturday afternoon – and the need for serious speed, taking gaps in the traffic that actually do not exist. Between registering landmarks like the police headquarters and the Kremlin, I check the speedometer and this guy is doing 160km on a city road, dicing his friend in another Beamer, madly waving at each other. When the friend takes an exit, Michael looks very pleased with himself, proclaiming his love for ‘Bee Em Vees’ and how this is actually his sister’s car and his is a ‘much faster’ 7-series. I am thankful for small mercies.

On arrival at Fabrika, I find the residency apartment abuzz with a small group of artists, including my roommate Iris. The others are the curators (Louise and Sergey) and some participants of a biennale show called Petit. Our group of six is Russian, French, German and South African, and we must settle on French as the common language. My vocabulary is pretty pathetic, but comprehension’s up to speed. We decide we need food and try the café on site, which is unfortunately closed. Iris looks familiar, but I’m so zoned from travelling and no sleep, I don’t give it another thought. She however, has the clarity to remember we met in Luxembourg in 2008, at the Candice Breitz-hosted symposium Call & Response. Iris was a student of Candice at Braunschweig and now does some teaching at the same institution. It’s a small (art) world, after all. We’re expecting our Finnish room-mate Linda Kronman on Tuesday.
 
We take the metro ride to Ploschad Revolutsii (Revolution Square), which will end up being a major reference point, from which several major Moscow sites are but metres away, including the Kremlin, Red Square and the Bolshoi. At a local bistro, I am faced with an indecipherable menu, but we do a Russian-French translation and I settle on a delicious mushroom julienne, goulash and the obligatory pivo (beer). Iris and I are both exhausted. It’s 11pm and the sun has not yet set, so we take a walk back to the metro via Red Square and head home.

June 27, 2010

It’s Sunday and the biennale people have indicated there will be no work today. So Iris and I decide to take a city walk. At Ploschad Revolyutsii, some political lookalikes are posing for tourists. I’m sure these will endure as a favourite, but they are also evidence of the Disney-fying of Russia’s history. After only two visits, Red Square’s hyperreal, theme-park feeling is entrenching itself.

We start at Khram Khrista Spasitelya (largest church in Moscow), past the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum (we find out about the ticket price – 300rub is the going rate – but decide it is not a priority), and along the river to Gorky Park, past the enormous monument to Peter the Great, to end up at the Tretyakovka, where the State Tretyakov Gallery houses its 20th century collections, including the Russian avant-garde and Socialist Realism, in a wing of the Central Artists’ House (TsDKh). Built in the 1960s and 1970s for an exhibition of Soviet Art which did not materialise, it’s generally considered by locals to represent the worst kind of Soviet architecture. I remember an article in yesterday’s Moscow News (with the Moscow Times, English-language dailies distributed free at coffee shops) about its possible demolition to make way for commercial property, but that there is no money available for a replacement venue to house the collection.

On the way, we pass through a subway jammed with Art-in-the-Park style paintings in every conceivable style. Between the dodgy knock-offs, there’s some weirdly anachronistic but competent classical academic painting. Although these artists have freely appropriated to the point to bald forgery, I am sternly reprimanded when I try to photograph. I sneak some pictures anyway. Later I realise this is the place my guidebook suggested would be a good place to buy paintings. It is not.

The Tretyakovka, apparently less visited than its historical counterpart is easily worth a full day’s visit. With bilingual texts, I get a better sense of Russia’s twentieth century art history, and I am particularly struck by Malevich’s figurative work produced after his Supermatist experiments, Tatlin’s stage designs for operas by Glinka, as well as reconstructions of his painterly reliefs. These are pretty fantastic, and installed in the same hall as a reconstruction of Rodchenko’s paradigm-shifting OBMOKHU exhibition from 1921. The scale of Socialist Realist painting really needs to be seen to be believed. Strictly no photographs in the museum though. Likewise in the metro stations, which were definitely part of the Socialist Realist ‘public’ art scheme - palaces for the proletariat, travelling about underground lit by crystal chandeliers and glittering mosaics.

Contemporary rooms present ‘Concept Art’ divided into various themes, including ‘Forever Childhood’; ‘Sacral and Banal’ (I’m sure it was supposed to read Sacred but we put it down to creative translation); ‘Sots Art’; ‘Political Pop’ and ‘Kinetic and Op Art’. There are clear resonances with South African art of the same period; issues of resistance, political transition, experimentation, celebration; all geared towards trying to find a local language to frame a range of practices that were suddenly exposed to the world after years of isolation.  

Exiting the museum, we amble through Iskusstv (Arts) Park, where Communist statues removed from their original locations came to die (although many have now been removed). I am left with the distinct impression that South Africa could learn a great deal from how contemporary Russia has dealt with a difficult cultural history. Our situations – having to reinvent ourselves for ourselves as well as for the international world, and where great wealth is in the hands of very few – are not dissimilar. I smell a research project coming on.

We rendezvous with the Franco-Russian group at the Manezhnaya Ploschad and stroll through the Alexander Gardens past the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the way home.

Practical knowledge after 36 hours in Moscow

Transport and Language
Free market practices have fully extended to every sphere of commercial life, and a bit of local knowledge goes a long way to figuring out when you are being ripped off or not. With a reputation as the world’s most expensive city, more billionaires per capita (and stiletto heels, without a doubt), than any other major city in the world, prices comparable to London and New York are not at all surprising. A stroll through department store GUM on the Red Square – a concentration of hyper-luxury brands equal to any chic shopping district in New York or Paris – is the only proof you need of capitalism’s seductive power. However, it is possible to get by on a South African budget. Public transport is affordable at 460rub (about R110) for 20 metro rides, which works out to about R5.50 per one-way trip, which includes connections across different metro lines. And believe me, Moscow’s sheer size and sprawl means the metro is your friend, but not so friendly if you have not familiarised yourself with Cyrillic. Nothing is in English except for a couple of modern street signs on major roads and the rare restaurant menu (if you are lucky). So you quickly learn to switch ‘B’s to ‘V’s, ‘H’s to ‘N’s, ‘P’s to ‘R’s, learn some new letter-forms and you’re on your way to being able to at least check you’re going in the right direction on the metro, or pronounce the name of a street when asking for directions. Trolley buses remain a total mystery.

Queuing
The rule of thumb is to assert your intention to progress forwards at all times. Do not make way for people, do not exercise modest politeness. You will find yourself forever at the back. This goes for shopping too. If you wait mutely and hope to be noticed, think again. You’ll be there until tomorrow.

Cigarettes
If you are a smoker travelling to Moscow, do not avail yourself of airport duty-free shopping before leaving SA. Like public drinking, smoking is a national pastime, and you can pick up a pack for the equivalent of R11.00. Local brands are even cheaper, and most bars and cafes encourage smoking, offering a non-smoking area for those who don’t.

Eating, drinking and human interaction
Facing temperatures in excess of 30 degrees on arrival, and walking the distances required in this city that sprawls meant an enormous consumption of bottled water. And this was my first lesson in the free market. A 500ml bottle at the airport cost me 60rub (R15); the same bottle from a street vendor later that day 25rub (R6); and a five litre bottle at a supermarket 55rub. It really pays to pay attention, and not frequent tourist-orientated eateries and cafes because it seems more linguistically convenient. Struggling a bit to make yourself understood is the best way to burn essential vocabulary into my brain. Portions in restaurants tend to be pretty frugal, and main dishes are what they say. If you order salmon, you will get a piece of salmon. Ordering everything else separately is a good way to compose your meal as you like it.

The irony and paradox of contemporary Moscow is poignantly illustrated on the Red Square, so well that it could be a site-specific intervention. Lenin’s mausoleum and the GUM shopping arcade face off across a vast expanse anchored by the confectionary-like St Basil’s Russian Orthodox cathedral, and peopled with couples, tourists and hustlers. The latter usually come in the form of loitering men, usually with a beer in hand, or old women, always carrying at least one ratty shopping bag, begging for money.

Usually abject and always persistent, some old dames are rather enterprising. Sitting at Manezhnaya Ploschad, with a dinner of  delicious slow-baked potatoes with various traditional fillings washed down with pivo, our small group was approached by such a headscarved babushka, who offered to sell us more pivo she had stashed in her aforementioned shopping bag. ‘Very cold!’ she declared. When we politely refused, she turned her attention to another potential customer (young, male) and when he brushed her off, she retaliated by giving his buttock a mighty pinch.

As to the loitering men, I have not yet figured out precisely what they want. Not speaking Russian is a distinct advantage in these situations, but each time I see one eyeing me with intent, I can’t help being reminded of something I read in my tourist guide book, which made me laugh out loud in Cape Town, but now I see the writer’s point. This particular nugget of information goes, “Russian men may seem chauvinistic but do not intend to offend. However, if you feel sexually harassed, cause a public scene rather than ignore it. Mace spray canisters are legal in Russia.” So, like much else, being demonstrative will get you what you need or want far faster, and with less frustration, than being shy.

The ‘chauvinism’ runs an ambivalent line between precisely that and old-fashioned gallantry. In the company of men, they will insist on carrying everything but your handbag, no matter how small or bulky. I was forbidden to lift my own suitcase. Women (thankfully none I have encountered in the art community yet) seem to return the favour by performing a kind of hyper-feminism that exists somewhere between princess and porn star. Moscow's young women navigate the city at least 4 to 6 inches taller. They dodge the treacherous terrain of tramtracks, uneven paving, cobblestones, grooved escalator steps and metal grilles outside metro stations. I’m telling you, these women are skilled. And then there is the extreme. Known by locals as the Russian Brides, they are stereotype personified. Generally peroxide blonde, dressed in satin and rhinestone cocktail dresses and Perspex platform heels at 11h00 in the morning, they are most often on the arm of a casually dressed man who tends to be more financially than aesthetically robust. This informal/formal dichotomy seems to persist in general male/female pairings but the Russian Brides are a subculture with a remarkable visual presence.

June 28, 2010  

So it’s Monday and I’ve spent the better part of a weekend wondering when I can start working, and whether or not my plans will materialise. Late morning, I meet Tatyana Dubrovina [IMAGE], co-ordinator of Proekt Fabrika exhibition spaces. She has not been briefed about my project requirements by the biennale team at all, which should make me really nervous. But she is capable, organised and really good conversation company (with a parallel career possibility as a Julia Roberts lookalike) – a gift in the midst of what sounds like absolute chaos in other venues. We look at the space, called Calandri Hall, right downstairs from the residency apartment. [IMAGE] It is a perfect industrial ruin. I realise it can be suitably modified with very little work. No building required, and a balcony will allow us to store the media equipment out of the way, but with easy access. Tatyana is battling to get a picture of the project in her head, so we sit down in the café and I take her through some documentation. She loves the work, and I am very relieved she is not disappointed by what has been forced on her at the very last minute.

Tatyana introduces me to Andrey, co-ordinator of all things technical for the biennale, and Segrey and Yuri who will be responsible for the necessary electrical fittings. I do a show-and-tell of the installation plans and switching unit, with Andrey and Tatyana as interlocutors. I imagine everybody wants a piece of Andrey, but he’s the antithesis of the hi-octane producers I am familiar with; he seems calm, attentive and cautious to confirm he and his team understand everything absolutely.

As museums are generally closed on a Monday, I spend the afternoon in the residency apartment, unpacking my drawings so they can flatten, checking my email and doing some writing. By late afternoon, suffocating in the intense heat, I need to get out and about, so I head to the centre and take refuge in GUM’s airconditioned luxury, trying to imagine it in its former manifestation as state department store, packed with, according to my guidebook, “shoddy electrical devices, outsized bras and queues.” Representing every conceivable luxury, designer brand and specialist stores, I manage about a quarter of the vast arcade, and restrict myself to window-shopping to protect my credit card.

June 29, 2010

I’m told by the technical team to amuse myself today, and have decided to visit the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, an initiative of ex-model, entrepreneur and philanthropist Dasha Zhukova – who also happens to be zillionaire oligarch and football boss Roman Abramovich’s partner and hasn’t yet turned 30. Iris needs a book to read, and I can’t say no to a bookshop excursion. And there’s the issue of some vital immigration ‘registration’ process that we’ve heard rumour of, but no firm details are forthcoming, other than if you don’t do it within three days of arriving in Russia, you’re liable for a serious fine when trying to leave the country. Surely this is what visas and immigration/landing cards are for? I text my biennale contact person to find out more. I am not keen on being on the wrong side of the Russian police. So it’s a full day already, and we haven’t stepped out the door.
 
For books, research tells us to head to the neighbourhood around the Arbatskaya metro stop. We walk a couple of blocks (in Moscow terms, this amounts to about a kilometre per block), past a book/stationery store and it doesn’t feel right. I spot what I think is a bookish-looking chap and his girlfriend and in our best non-Russian, we ask for directions. He tells us we are in fact standing in front of the shop we are looking for, but that it’s not a good one. Instead, they offer to escort us to ‘the best bookshop in Moscow’. Twenty minutes later, back the way they had already come, on the way explaining the politics of aristocratic church-building in the 17th century and good places for cake, they deposit us at the door of Dom Knigi on Ulitsa Noviy Arbat. He is right. It’s a vast, well-stocked, multi-lingual heaven and I finally find a city map in English. Four days of wandering into every bookstore and newsagent I passed had turned up nothing, and here I have a choice of five different versions. I pick up a biography of Catherine the Great (I am mildly obsessed to know more about her art collecting acumen) and Dostoevsky’s (when in Russia…) The Double and Notes from Underground, both of which have been on my Must Read list for two current studio projects. Iris finds Nabokov’s Lolita in German. She’s thrilled. The Russian brides have activated her desire to do some experimental performance while in Moscow and this seems like mandatory reading.
 
Over a quick lunch, I get a reply from the biennale urging me to go immediately to the admin hub, based at the National Centre for Contemporary Art. This registration process is indeed critical, and today is the deadline – another last-minute realisation for the biennale team, and they sound pretty freaked out. Still no programme available in English for the biennale openings, which commence in 2 days. My attempts to meet with curators prove fruitless as everyone is busy in different parts of the city. This is a fundamentally decentred project: no main office, about thirty different venues and hundreds of artists. For an outsider, this is a bit frustrating, as you can’t get your bearings around a central point. On the other hand, it gives me time to experience a new city in some detail, without falling into a pattern of seeing the same people every day, or pressure to attend press conferences (which were all in Russian anyway). This is a luxury that seldom happens on such trips, when, more often than not, you find yourself in an unfamiliar city and all you see are the four walls of a white cube exhibition space. The familiarity of gallery architecture is like an airport – pretty similar no matter where you are in the world. While it can offer some comfort, it also makes me a little crazy.
 
The Garage Centre is exactly such a place, metaphorically and literally speaking. A contemporary kunsthalle that feels so absolutely international you could be in any major EuroAmerican metropolis, and about the size of an airport hangar (actually, an ex-bus garage). It’s a feat of 1920s Constructivist engineering that Zhukova rescued from post-Soviet ruin. Current shows included AES+F’s The Feast of Trimalchio, a stupendous 9-channel video installation and a collection of large-scale, high-end (and totally unnecessary) photographic tableaux; Carsten Hoeller’s Giant Triple Mushrooms (why?); Francesco Vezzoli’s collaboration with Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi Ballet (with costumes by Miuccia Prada – you get the drift); the first major Rothko show to hit Moscow with a good supporting film programme; and Klaus Biesenbach’s 100 Years of Performance, an archive of documentation, ephemera and video of a century of performance art. The Vezzoli was glitzy but devoid of any affect whatsoever; I was really sorry about this as it sounded like a great idea, but which ultimately left me with nothing at all. AES+F really impressed me at Venice in 2007 and they’ve clearly upped the ante on what was already an intense live-action and CGI production process, employed to create contemporary allegories of violence, excess and simulacral existence. The curator in me recognised the photographic works as what belonged on an art fair and I wished they weren’t included here. The performance art show was a very useful introduction to key practitioners and historical events, but for a practice that is so much about time, duration, endurance, the temporary and non-object-based processes, the fact that it is presented so selectively – and canonised – by an influential curator like Biesenbach is a real pity. I could identify no African artists in his selection (I might be wrong, but I had a good look) but on the plus side, local audiences are encouraged to participate in an active archive around the project. And the centre offers what looks like a great programme of talks and discussions in general.
 
While the work on offer screams money and trend, I pick up a great book on the state of the 21st art institution here, and a long, cool drink on the terrace of the café offered a welcome respite from the searing heat.
 
Later than evening I realise I don’t have my credit card. Normally this would freak me out completely, but I’m convinced I left it at the Garage Centre, distracted by a conversation with the sales assistant about various books on contemporary Russian art, but which turned out not to be available in English. I’ll have to go back tomorrow.

July 1
 
Given my installation schedule, which changes shape by the day depending on the availability of assistants, today is probably my last day to visit Lenin’s Mausoleum, and it is a priority.
 
I soon realise that the experience of trying to view Lenin’s embalmed remains is about the whole process of queuing (not from the front of the mausoleum, but at the entrance to Red Square near the Tomb of Unknown Soldier), fending off souvenir sellers, and trying to decipher the guard’s shouted instructions while marching the length of the queue. Virtually no one in the queue speaks Russian, so the instructions to check all large bags, cameras and mobile phones is not understood, causing considerable confusion when advancing to stage 2 and 3 of the queuing process. I eventually reach the entrance to the memorial complex and must turn back to hand in the necessary items at the security kiosk. The guards are friendly though. When they ask where I am from, my reply of ‘South Africa’ generates huge smiles and exclamations of ‘Football! Vuvuzela!’ Yes indeed.
 
It’s a procession past various commemorative plaques and memorials to the entrance to the mausoleum, which is as pitch dark as the day is bright. When my eyes adjust, an impeccably uniformed guard seems to materialise from the gloom, perfectly pin-spotted. He silently gestures left, and I proceed, followed by another pin-spotted guard, and another, and another, down into the depths. The space opens up into a vault, bathed in a dim red glow. There Lenin lies, waxy, wearing a suit, gently illuminated from within his glass sarcophagus. You are not permitted to pause at any point. It’s an artful piece of installation theatre. Not being allowed the time to really inspect things prevents any dissolution of the myth, the spectacle of his legacy. I’m enthralled. They got me.
 
I make my way across town to the State Tretyakov Gallery to view the medieval icon collection, portraits of the aristocracy and their courtiers, and the greats of pre-20thC Russian painting (Repin and the like). The gallery holds the largest collection of Russian art in the world, founded when industrialist Pavel Tretyakov presented his private collection to the city in 1892. Doesn’t Tretyakov sound a lot like Tretchikoff? Hmmm. The architecture is Russian revivalist outside and traditional picture gallery, hung salon-style, inside. I’m really struck by what seems to be a specific individuality in Russian historical portraiture that I’m not sure is present in quite the same way in other European academic painting. But I am physically exhausted, and suffering from serious visual fatigue. The museum is busy, indeed much more so than the modern Tretyakovka. And I must press on to the National Centre of Contemporary Art, where the first exhibition opening of the biennale is scheduled for 18h00. I must also collect my registration/exit stamp document there. Rumours are flying between visiting artists that the penalty for not having this document ranges from $100 to 500,000rub but no one really knows anything for sure. And apparently nothing spreads faster in Russia than a rumour.
 
The NCCA exhibition Vis-à-Vis is a joint French-Russian group show. I learn that 2010 is ‘The Year of France in Russia and The Year of Russian in France’, a rather clumsy way of saying there’s a focus on bilateral cultural projects this year between the two countries. Taken on their own, many of the works are interesting, but it fails to coalesce as an exhibition. People are fascinated by a sculpture in the form of a writing desk that doubles as a grand palace, complete with miniature chandeliers and sweeping staircases. I like two small installations, Cédric Alby’s A Human Use of Technology and Ilya Trushevsky’s Clots.

I realise that the poised young woman speaking alongside cultural representatives from the Russian ministry and the Lyon exhibition partners is Daria (Dasha) Pyrkina, chief curator for the biennale and also for its main exhibition Glob(E)scape (in which my work is included). She is apparently responsible for three other shows on the biennale as well. I tremble at the thought of her workload – hence her demeanour of serious beta-blocker consumption? It’s hard to tell, but I take the opportunity to introduce myself and she is pleased to see me, concerned that everything is going well and that I am happy. I assure her I am and she’s off to the next set of openings, within walking distance at one of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art’s venues. I am still floored at the confidence and chutzpah of this biennale team, not one of which is over 28, as far as I know.
 
At the opening we hear another rumour, this time of terrorist action on the metro. Having heard no sirens or other action, I remain unconvinced and unperturbed. All I know is that if I spend another day walking the city, I will face a double foot amputation. I vow to spend tomorrow at Fabrika, taking it easy between bouts of installation work.
 
We head to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art for a quadruple opening of Freedom; Liberty (both curated by Daria Kamyshnikova and Sergey Yerkov); -transit- (curated by Marina Fomenko and Malgorzata Sobolewska) and Miracles of Idleness (curated by Nelya Korzhova). The first two are the strongest exhibitions thus far, with some really interesting work and holding together very well as projects with a strong position. I’m surprised by this, as tackling notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ can come across as trite. I like some of the work on the other two shows, but they somehow don’t make as strong and lasting a statement as Freedom and Liberty do.
 
The quieter works on Freedom hold my attention: Marina Andwander’s Everyone’s Best Friends is simple but commanding: an installation of many portrait ovals containing faces clipped from banknotes. Michael Johanssen’s Tetris blocks a doorway with precisely stacked packaging rescued from the garbage. Sabrina Harri’s Untitled video installation is a smart doubling of an image of a exit door projected over the same door. The projector’s mount is fitted with a motor so the image is unsteady, the projected exit never quite registering with the actual exit. She complains to me that it should have been installed at the end of a long corridor. I see how this would be a great option, but I remain convinced by this solution, even if she isn’t. Several artists choose to work on a small, even miniature scale, like Alexander Glandien’s series of snowglobes depicting the ‘invisible’ homeless, and an artist whose name I did not take down, who presented an installation of tiny environments, animation and text written directly onto the wall, including one rather desperate sentence: ‘I want to escape from the prison of my dreams and hopes’.
 
In Liberty, Habib Asal’s I am a Palestinian audio and poster work stands out, along with Yana Smetanina’s Letter to Tatlin (Information Field) and Jeanne De Petriconi’s Curled Environment. Ideas of reproduction/creation come through strongly in two very different works, Viktor Petrosyan’s Rubik’s Cube and rope-light DNA helix and Taisia Korotkova’s exquisitely executed installation of tempera paintings.
 
Miracles of Idleness is dominated by a large and complex installation Ride one / Wandering by a collaborative called Project Diligence but I really take to a video piece (sorry, no name again) depicting a sleeping/dreaming girl and two glass vessels like those at the base of a hookah pipe, filling with smoke which dissipates with no human intervention. Shot in black and white, it has a séance-like quality, like a visual opiate. Transit is busy and rather confusing – the gallery is so hot I can barely breathe, so in all fairness, I couldn’t give it much time, but I am really amused by Mateusz Sadowski’s Tao Te Ching, Chapter 18, where somebody is attempting to transcribe this text in ketchup on every available surface in their kitchen.

Friday July 2
 
I’m hoping to complete the installation today as the opening is tomorrow at 4pm. I meet the team at noon, and we check the lighting installation. All is in place except for one unit, so while they deal with that, Andrey and I install the strobe, switchbox and audio components. They still need to block out the windows, which Andrey realises (a bit late) that this will require a scaffold. Tatyana comes to the rescue and locates someone who can provide one, but it will only arrive late afternoon. I have some time to kill until they’re done with all this – and I’m still hoping to get the drawings up today, but a quick tour of the other biennale exhibitions in the Fabrika complex is enough evidence that there is a LOT still to do. But what a great collection of spaces. You can do a virtual tour of some of them on Proekt Fabrika’s website.
 
Tatyana introduces me to Alexander Ivanov of independent Ad Marginem Press. They publish continental philosophy in Russian translation (Baudrillard, Derrida, Benjamin and the like), and work with a number of fiction and non-fiction writers. We have a great conversation. Ivanov welcomes me to sit in their office and browse the shelves. He offers me a mid-afternoon vodka which I politely decline in favour of water. It’s too hot. I find a crime fiction novel called The Prophet Murders by Mehmet Murat Somer. I’m hooked from the first page – I’ve never read Turkish transvestite detective fiction and it’s rather hilarious. Oblivious to my hosts, I only realise it’s time to excuse myself when they start leaving for the day.
 
The technicians are still busy in my space, so we’ll have to hang the drawings tomorrow. There are openings at a major Moscow contemporary art venue called the Winzavod Centre for Contemporary Art (in an old winery) from 18h00, but it is now after 19h30 and I am simply too tired to make the journey. I’m sorry to miss seeing the complex, as it’s used for the main Moscow Biennale and the complex also plays host to smaller commercial galleries and design destinations, but I’ll get a report from Iris and Linda later.
 
They arrive back from what sounds like a rather underwhelming set of shows and a very active vodka bar at the opening party. I get a progress report on their respective exhibitions. Linda is working – or trying to – at Artplay, which is where the lead biennale show Glob(E)scape is being installed. Equipment is arriving very slowly, if at all, and artists are having to improvise like mad. Two Spanish artists, Vanessa and Israel, have arrived, expecting to install a neon sculpture that the biennale agreed to produce for them instead of risking shipping it from Spain. On arrival at the venue, they are told that producing the work is no longer possible. The show opens at 7pm tomorrow. They improvise a performance, part of which involves tracking down the only remaining copy in Moscow of a Russian translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, which was critical to the development of the work-that-is-not. Iris tells of similar delays at Tsaritsyno, where they are battling to get museum curators to remove a historical collection occupying the space meant for their show Petit, which opens the day after tomorrow. What to do but offer good-humoured, mutual sympathy and realise we’re all in the same, rather rudderless, boat?

July 3

I’m ready at 09h00 to hang the drawings as planned, but the team is not. I get a bit panicky leaving things till the last minute, but there’s nothing I can do. They’re finally ready for me at 13h00, and while we’re done fairly efficiently, it doesn’t leave any time for adjustments. It looks great though, and with just the right sense of tension and disorientation. But as Murphy would have it, the system decides to start malfunctioning 30 minutes before opening time. I switch it to a two-phase sequence, and must just be happy with that for now.
 
I visit my space at the opening time of 16h00 sharp, and Tatyana is giving a walkthrough for a large group of people attending a creative industries conference at Fabrika.  She ropes me in to a lively discussion of the work, which is wonderful. I was nervous to present these images as I was really not sure how contemporary Russians would feel about a foreigner responding to Chikatilo’s violence and the spectacular media coverage of his case. But they seem to only have a vague recollection of the events, and are genuinely surprised I even know about it. They respond to the installation as a kind of mental or psychic prison, which I am very excited about. It works.  
 
Later I meet Polina Vasilieva, executive director of the biennale, who loves the work. We hang around the various spaces at Fabrika for a couple of hours, then head to Artplay for the opening of Glob(E)scape. We are forced to miss the show at Zverev Centre for Contemporary Art as it is happening simultaneously.
 
Glob(E)scape is a sprawling show, installed in a quickly renovated industrial space with wraparound glass windows that offer a great view of the river, but which kill the video screens installed nearby. There’s huge amount of work, some interesting, some not. I’m sure the nature of the process has affected some projects quite badly, whereas others manage to hold up. I shoot a few pictures, but the labelling is a bit haphazard, and as the catalogue is late, I can’t refer to anything accurately. But it’s a buzz, very well attended with some live graffiti performance and I meet a host of artists, one of which recently graduated from the sculpture programme in Chicago where Jose Ferreira now teaches. People are being pushed around in modified wheelbarrows. Painted black with blue sirens, I can’t help laughing at the allusion to the notorious blue light convoys used and abused by local politicos. If only they’d trade their SUVs for wheelbarrows…
 
There’s a great piece consisting of various collections of objects laid out in squares on the floor that suggest contemporary lives, perhaps displaced, that are trying to retain some aspects of tradition with a globalised homogeneity. Another wonderful work was an installation of large photographs of unremarkable boxed objects, bits and pieces really. Around the corner, the boxes – matchbox-sized in reality – were presented in a vitrine like a cityscape, with small monuments, and suggestions of streets. The shifts in scale really did draw one into the space of the work itself, rather than being overwhelmed by the vastness of the exhibition venue.

July 4

I spend the morning trying to figure out what is going on with the electrics in my exhibition venue. I get the installation going again, but after about 30 minutes, it starts acting up. I’m seeing a pattern, but there’s nothing I can do about it until tomorrow when I have access to electricians and hardware stores.
 
Linda and I head to the Izmayelovsky Market for some souvenir hunting. She works collaboratively with various people in the context of peace education, transforming garments associated with war and conflict into a kind of ready-to-wear collection. We find some great Soviet-era army gear for her to work with and I buy a rather mad matryoschka doll depicting Russian political leaders from Medvedev all the way down to a truly miniscule Catherine the Great.
 
By 15h00, we’re at Tsaritsyno for the opening of Petit and Calabi-Yau Performance Festival. I like the Petit installation, with its systems of plinths designed (apparently) around a Malevich prototype. Conceived as a travelling show that can fit into a suitcase, I wonder whether curators Louise Morin and Sergey Balovin are thinking in terms of Duchamp’s Boite en Valise? It’s hard to imagine otherwise. Iris’s work, called Travel Tit and made from a blow-up doll and rubber glove – and with which you are encouraged to interact – is great, and generates much interest from the museum guards. Pascal Tremelo’s modular plant root/cast finger sculpture is beautiful. The performance festival presents the kind of hi-tech, digital interactive work favoured among some young Russian artists (and often showcased when Russian work is shown abroad, like at Venice) but it was a work by British artist Anna Mawby called Interminable that had me astounded at her commitment. Meditating on the possibility that there may be more to life than what immediately presents itself, Mawby pricked a roll of paper a quarter of a million times to form the words ‘I was waiting’ over and over again. A work like this needs a room to itself, but this show, like all the others, suffered from a surfeit of content – too much distraction.
 
There are two more openings this evening, at Volga Gallery and the State Museum of Contemporary Art of the Russian Academy of Arts (try saying that after a few vodkas), but other than sheer physical and mental exhaustion making Iris, Linda and I reluctant, and the fact that I must pack before leaving tomorrow, Linda catches a late-night train back to Finland. So we decide to skip the openings, have a traditional Ukrainian dinner at a restaurant in our neighbourhood and see her off.
 
Before dinner, Linda and I squeeze in a final tourist gesture, this time to the Space Travel Museum located under an enormous titanium rocket monument in the old Worlds Fair show grounds. The base of the monument is a relief frieze on a grand scale, depicting the idealisation of science and the grand narratives of progress. Like in some of the metro stations, the patina’d bronze is buffed to a high sheen in parts, from people touching the sculptures, ostensibly for good luck. Here it is an astronaut’s thumb that begs to be caressed, as he strides up the steps into his awaiting capsule. I jump up on the relief and can barely reach it, jumping off just as fast as I am sternly reproached by a lurking guard but Linda gets a picture of my transgression anyway. The museum is a space-lover’s paradise. I imagine this is where kids go wild. From Yuri Gagarin’s space suits, to stuffed dogs (sadly no Laika), sputniks and other astronomical technology, no labels are in English but it’s a total visual trip nonetheless.  And dinner, consisting of borsch, pelmeni and various other delicacies, is delicious.

 
July 5

Today I leave for the airport at 13h30. I meet Andre and Sergey at 08h30, to review the situation with the switchbox. It works, but is inconsistent, which I am not happy about. I am convinced we need to regulate the current coming into the switcher, but it is difficult to discuss this in any detail without Russian. I am in communication with my technician in SA who built the unit, who suggests two possible solutions. We decide to head off to a specialist electronics store to get the necessary equipment. On the way, I am introduced to how most Muscovites get around when you’re in a hurry – stick out your thumb and hitch. Most Muscovites are happy to act as informal cab drivers for a couple of roubles, which one must negotiate. It’s efficient and it works. The consultant at the shop confirms what we need but sends us to the equivalent of a Builders Warehouse-meets-Game in a local mall. We get what we (think) we need and must rush back to Fabrika as I am now running alarmingly late. We take another Muscovite form of transport – the minibus taxi! I feel right at home.
 
We run some final tests but time is very short. I leave Tatyana and Andre with a range of options, including ultraviolet torches that visitors can explore the dark, cavernous space on their own. It works brilliantly, but I am still eager to resolve the issue with the switcher, which Tatyana promises to do in consultation with a specialist. As usual, the farewell is hasty but we promise to keep in touch, and I commit to applying for a residency at the space as I am certain my work in Moscow, a city of huge and deeply energising contradictions, is just beginning.