MOSCOW — The III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art opened earlier this month, with its main exhibition on view at the Central House of Artists, while special projects are housed at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMoMA) and National Centre for contemporary Arts (NCCA). Known by many as “the Kids’ Biennale,” this year's presentation features a truly international set of artists for the first time. Curator Kathrin Becker, the head of the Video-Forum at Berlin's Neuer Berliner Kunstverein — who has curated group shows in Berlin, New York, Barcelona, and Prague, and solo exhibitions by Louise Bourgeois, Maryam Jafri, Matthias Muller, Arthur Zmievski, and famous Russian artists Andrey Monastyrsky and Dmitry Prigov — can be credited for the Biennale's unprecedented internationalization.
The Moscow Biennale's main exhibition, titled “Under A Tinsel Sun,” is on view at the Central House of Artists, and features works by 80 artists from 33 countries — including 11 Russian artists, 7 from Germany, and 6 from the U.S. and Austria. After the opening earlier this month, Becker met ARTINFO Russia to talk about her work and the Biennale.
What are your impressions after the opening of the project?
In general, the exhibition looks like we intended it to be. The Central House of Artists is a complexly structured space. Certain things were not quite a success: I was unhappy with the quality of some video installations, although that was inevitable with such an ambitious approach. But I’m perfectly content with almost all of it.
How did you select the young artists for the show?
Finding young talent was not easy, so the selection procedure was helpful. On the other hand, we invited certain artists with some known works to participate in the exhibition — although they had to undergo the same competitive process as well. More than a half of the artists in the group of 80 came to the Biennale by invitation. Many ask me why there are so few Russian artists, when in face there are more Russian artists — 11 of them — than any other nationality. The U.S., Germany, and Austria are the next most represented. I believe that if the Biennale does not rise to an international level while remaining a local event, the Russian artists will be the first to lose this opportunity to show their work in an international context.
That said, the West has not demonstrated much interest in contemporary Russian art. The older generation belongs to the international context — Yuri Albert, Vadim Zakharov, or Yuri Lejderman — but for young artists the situation is more difficult. That is why they have to promote themselves, and the Biennale for Young Art's selection process seems to offer the right strategy.
How did you define whether or not an artist is young? Age requirements don't seem to be a useful metric.
After thinking it over many times, I would agree that age is not the best way to determine this, but we felt justified due to the non-existence of support systems for young artists. Of course, the age-based selection is a disputable strategy: 35-year-old artists are eligible for the show, but 36-year-old artists are not.
Why did you agree to curate the Biennale?
I was wondering what united young artists, and if they had anything in common. Everybody keeps asking what it’s all about, what are the tendencies and themes that interest young artists. At the same time, it’s clear that young art is not heterogeneous and it’s hard to say which trends it follows. But it was interesting to find what really were the unifying factors, especially when we started to talk about very different countries.
The unifying factors tended to be artists' living conditions and their world views. This generation has been raised in a virtual epoch with constant access to the Web, and that undoubtedly affects the structure of their identity. On the iInternet one may take on several personalities at the same time, which also triggers some psychological changes. The Internet became available in the '90s, and our artists were born from 1975-1985, so this is the first generation of artists to have grown up with the Web. However, I did not pick any projects made in the virtual world — I preferred to focus on how the virtual world reacts to perceptions of the real.
III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art will continue through August 10. The see works from the exhibition, click the slide show.
This article also appears on ARTINFO Russia.