Going with the Flow at the Moscow Photobiennale

MOSCOW—There’s a buzz all over town: The photobiennale’s going ’round. The seventh Moscow Photobiennale, which opened March 21, offers a series of openings that for two weeks are the places to be for the city’s art lovers and professionals. All of Moscow’s main exhibition halls contain photobiennale shows, from the prestigious Manege, which is situated close to the Kremlin, to both buildings of the Museum of Modern Art. The festival’s biggest highlights include five shows of Magnum Photo mainstays at the Winzavod Cultural Center and retrospectives of Ralph Gibson, Franco Fontana, Mario Giacomelli, and Anton Corbijn. The photobiennale is subtitled “a month of photography,” but many of the shows extend well into May.

The photobiennale began in 1996, the same year as the opening of the Moscow House of Photography, the museum that organizes the event. Those were strange times for large initiatives in Russia’s art world: The contemporary galleries worked as nonprofit showrooms, paying their rent by giving practical advice to collectors of 19th-century painting, while the museums leased space for dealer-sponsored exhibitions. The photobiennale provided a state-sponsored break from this bleak post-communist, pre-capitalist confusion. But everything has a price. The biennale’s director Olga Sviblova is famous for her fund-raising efforts (this year’s sponsors include one of Russia’s most popular cell phone providers, Beeline, as well as Google Russia) and successful exhibitions (shows of international fashion photographers like Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton and rising local talents like AES + F and Andrey Bartenev — the latter two featured at the Sviblova-curated Russian pavilion of the 52nd Biennale in Venice), but she is also known for her ability to negotiate with authorities. According to sources, this has come at a cost: She's effectively forfeited her right to criticize the city government’s decisions concerning the heritage policy — a painful topic for most of Moscow’s intellectuals keen on saving the old city before it gets sold to private developers.

Regardless of the politics, the photobiennale has become an indisputable landmark of Moscow’s art scene — an all-encompassing review of everything connected to the medium, from new photo-based art to contemporary photojournalism to historical surveys. If the event lacks a direction and a strategy, it makes up for this in the sheer scope of work exhibited. Sadly, the one genre that seems not to be spotlighted is contemporary Russian photography, with local, present-day artists getting lost among their international peers and historical predecessors.

Still, this year’s edition of the photobiennale is incredibly diverse. In the Museum of Modern Art, we get glimpses of Jim Dine’s 1990s still lifes, which are clearly inspired by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg’s celebrations of the banal, and a project by Polish photographer Hana Jakrlova, exploring the reality of a brothel that uses video cameras to broadcast the sordid happenings of private rooms for other clients to watch live and enjoy. At Winzavod, the five Magnum shows are complemented by an exhibition of works by English fashion photographer John Rankin as well as Turkish photojournalist Göksin Sipahioglu’s chronicle of Paris in May 1968. The biennale’s largest exhibition hall, the Manege, hosts shows by international stars and a curated exhibition, “The Path to Color,” which is a history of Russian color photography from the 1910s through the Khruschev era.

All this, and there’s still more to come. Next month Jenny Holzer will show her work at the Volker Diehl gallery in April, and the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation will present an Andreas Gursky retrospective.

The photobiennale’s mishmash of old and new, art and documentary, can be distressing at first, but Muscovites love it. The show plays on the old habit of going with the flow, and while there are three or four galleries in Moscow that specialize in contemporary photography, they tend to draw crowds only during the biennale.