Kunsthalle Wien Acting Relations, Mapping Positions Part I: The Individual HOW TO GATHER Acting Relations, Mapping Positions 3 21 Bart De Baere, Defne Ayas, Keren Cytter — Nicolaus Schafhausen — Note From Bed Background 23 9 Hanne Lippard — Marie Egger — Here’s it Editorial 25 Sergey Bratkov — Predictions on the Moon 33 Liam Gillick — Letters from Moscow 43 Li Mu — The Labourer 63 Ho Tzu-Nyen and Lee Weng-Choy — Curation is Also a Form of Transportation 77 Lee Weng-Choy — Three Degrees of Intimacy 81 Meggy Rustamova — Waiting for the Secret (Script) 85 Johanna van Overmeir — Janus 88 Janus Faced Freedom Marina Simakova Part II: In Relation Part III: Political Gestures HOW TO GATHER Acting Relations, Mapping Positions 89 119 176 225 Peter Wächtler — Mián Mián and Konstantin Zvezdochotov — Anna Jermolaewa and Leather Man / Woman of Nicolaus Schafhausen — About Ezgin Altinses Vanessa Joan Müller — the Bistro Talkshow Political Extras 180 104 131 Inventing Ritual 237 Jimmie Durham — Communicative Failures Leon Kahane — A Stone and Defeats 186 Figures of Authority Andrey Shental Gabriel Lester — 108 MurMure 243 Donna Kukama — 132 Nástio Mosquito — The Cemetery for Bad Honoré δ’O and 195 SOUTH Behaviours Fabrice Hyber — Honoré δ’O — Telepathic Protocol The Ten Commandments 246 114 Saâdane Afif — On Intimacy 137 215 Play Opposite Maria Kotlyachkova, Nadia Qiu Zhijie — Vaast Colson — Gorokhova Map of the Third World Ten Side Notes as Warm Up 250 Rana Hamadeh — 140 219 Performance Script Augustas Serapinas — Andrey Kuzkin — Conversation Behind the Balloons and Nails 259 Map of the Third World Exoticising and Deciphering 220 the Caucasus 148 Isa Genzken — Maria Kramar Anastasiya Yarovenko — Die kleine Bushaltestelle HowTOgether (Gerüstbau) 262 Taus Makhacheva — 153 221 Interviews with Acrobats Birdhead and On Togetherness Daniil Kolchanov — Alexander Zhuravlev, Anna Zhurba, 286 22 September – 01 October Ivan Isaev, Sona Stepanyan, Maria Ilya Budraitskis — 2015 Stepkina Art as a Partisan? 158 292 Gleb Berg — Ines and Eyal Weizman — Untitled (An Art Story in Between the Dissident Three Art Novels) and the Activist 307 Alevtina Kakhidze — All Times News 3 Background (or: How we acted under highly volatile circumstances) We never dreamt we would create the biennial as it occurred. Nor did we imagine we would be publishing this book two years later. The 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, as an exhibition, was never fully ours, just as this book is not fully ours either. We are merely a node in a network that feels the urgency for proper public reflection. A similar kind of urgency led us to devote our best efforts to an almost defunct biennial, which resulted in an exhibition of remarkable vitality created under exceptional cir- cumstances. This publication is the outcome of a shared feeling among the biennial’s producers and participants that it had been successful on one of the most important levels a cultural project can hope to achieve: in generating a collective sense of capacity, meaning, and camaraderie. Over ten days — a brief period for an international survey of contemporary art — the biennial re-oriented the public platform of VDNKh’s Central Pavilion, the former Soviet exhibi- tion venue for Achievements of the National Economy, toward the question of how to gather. It was a question that functioned both as the engine and the outcome of the engagement we embarked upon in Moscow under highly volatile conditions in which the relations between the two poles of Europe — the European Union and Russia — and, more locally, between the biennial and the city partners, were rapidly deteriorating. So, we decided to scrap everything that makes exhibitions today so expensive — crated air transports, insurance, and high- end production — and invest the limited budget in what we value highly instead: people and actions. There were pragmatic rea- sons for this decision too: the weakening exchange rate of the ruble in which the biennial budget had initially been expressed and the reluctance displayed by most European state cultural funding bodies to support a dialogue in and with Moscow (thus often undermining many states’ official foreign policy). How- ever dire these conditions may have been, they came to function as incentives: to go back to basics rather than to forfeit, to approach each new limitation as a trigger for further radicalisa- tion. 5 4 We could have addressed these limits by exercising critique or their proposals. We committed to a flow of different moments; to antagonised them by revolt or exodus, by boycott or transgression. being attentive to these moments and letting them guide us. That Instead, we tested and searched for opportunities to galvanise the said, and despite all efforts, it is much to our regret that a handful biennial. We set upon the construction of a space that could func- of honoraria, including pre-financed airline tickets, are yet to be tion as a think tank realised in real time. The space would diverge honoured more than a year later. from contemporary standards of display and demonstrate a clear This publication stands as a testament to our conviction that intention to locate a different present during the time span of the the input of the participants be met by an equally serious com- biennial, one that focused on potential starting points beyond mitment from the host of the biennial. Our commitment, first and impasse. In so doing, the biennial was limited to an unprecedented foremost, was to those outcomes of the biennial that we could not ten days; to have people meet we needed to facilitate their coming have predicted beforehand, believing this to be what public space together in the same space at the same time. is all about. Rather than a documentation of the biennial’s on-site One of the key expressions in Russian tradition is the soviet, activities, the publication that you hold in your hands manifests which can be taken to mean ‘council’ or ‘assembly’ but also those activities in their potential of continuation. The content ‘advice’, ‘harmony’, and ‘concord’. Etymologically, it is derived has been sourced from and by the media machine that was ac- from notions of togetherness and counsel, with the Proto-Slavonic tive during the ten days of the biennial and features interviews, verbal stem vetiti as its ultimate keyword, meaning ‘to talk’ or professional documentation by cameramen and photographers, ‘to speak’. And so, how do we speak together? Often not particu- and critical writing from enlisted Moscow-based bloggers who larly well. The aim of the exhibition, however, was simultaneously annotated and analysed the biennial as it progressed, with the more ambitious than simply speaking together and yet also more goal of one day reflecting upon the capacities it offered. basic through the provocation of a series of necessary prereq- The gargantuan task of digesting and then transforming the uisites: What are the grounds upon which to build a constitu- vast amount of digital material into a humble book of and for ency? Who are we (people, city, nation, empire, etc.)? What will reflection required one step further still. Many of those involved Moscow be like in the future? What fundamentals constitute with the organisation of the biennial continued to care for the a better life? And the highly urgent question: How can we live content beyond the exhibition’s ten-day run. Marie Egger took on together? the process of editing across three different cities — Antwerp, Rot- Moscow presents unique challenges and thus stimulates unique terdam, and Moscow. Evi Bert organised the 3.4 terabyte digital focus. As organisers, we sought to realise our aspired temporary archive now hosted by M HKA. Katya Savchenko, the biennial’s public space without compromising it to accord with other peo- lead producer, never let go of overall responsibility. Maria-Louiza ple’s desires or expectations or priorities. Our question was how Ouranou came on board at the last minute to salvage this book not to compromise our aspiration, how to enable the coming-into- and coordinate the design and production process before it went being and the letting-be of a public space through inaction. We to press. Many other participants — artists, thinkers, and visitors facilitated an environment in which we, as organisers, artists and alike — were also involved in this process, informing the material thinkers, as well as the biennial’s local and international public, or producing retrospective remarks. could gain an insight into the future and possible trajectories an Engaged in continual deliberations over its future — to become open space as such might engage. That was highly urgent, and extinct or transform itself — the Moscow Biennale Foundation, as not just for Moscow. such, did not produce this book. Instead, this publication results The artists’ presence was not limited strictly to the creation of from the united efforts of M HKA, the Witte de With Center for their works in situ but rather unfolded through their direct par- Contemporary Art, Kunsthalle Wien, and the V-A-C Foundation. ticipation as cultural actors (individually and in relation to each The latter, sharing our intuition that the evaluation of the biennial other) at the onset of the creation of cultural space. We lobbied to ought to be continued, assembled a group of young curators in direct funds toward their involvement and a support system for Moscow and asked them to analyse the core of the biennial and Bart Nicolaus De Baere, Defne Ayas, Schafhausen — Background 7 6 its associated program, which hopefully added more value to the park for drawing the faces of seas of people; or Michelangelo question How to gather? Pistoletto’s work Third Paradise that is not his, it is shared — it we What did , as three organisers, and the invited participants, is that of others.