GOING EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE FROM MOSCOW TO THE URALS – HOW CURATORIAL DELUSIONS OF GLOBAL GRANDEUR BETRAY RUSSIAN ART

BY SIMON HEWITT

I : A MOSCOW MIRED IN MEMORIES

A BANNER was dangling from the giant triumphal portico of VDNKh, beneath the two collective farmworkers brandishing their bale of straw. It advertised the 6th Moscow Biennale – the number 6 allotted spiralling arms to resemble a Catherine Wheel. But the banner was challenged by a bigger hoarding wheeled on to the piazza below, blowing the trumpet of a separate festival called Circle of Light .

The Biennale’s main show was taking place just behind Lenin in VDNKh’s Central Pavilion (also known as Pavilion N°1), erected in 1954 and topped by a 350-foot spire modelled on the St Petersburg Admiralty.

The Biennale was meant to open at noon. I tried to find the entrance but couldn’t. There were no signs. No information about where and when the Biennale could be visited. Yuri Albert’s immortal line breezed through my mind: The Biennale cannot and will not take place . The 6 th Moscow Biennale had been having well-publicized financial problems. Was it so bankrupt that it had ceased to exist, morphing instead into a Conceptualist joke?

VDNKh, six miles north of Red Square, was the sixth venue for the Moscow Biennale’s main exhibition. It had previously been held in the former Lenin Museum near Red Square; the under-construction Federation Tower at Moscow City; the newly restored Garage (now Jewish) Museum during its brief Abramovich/Zhukova tenancy; the renovated ArtPlay cultural and commercial complex; and, in 2013, the Manezh.

The choice of the vast, swanky Manezh, central Moscow’s leading venue for glitzy art shows and (increasingly political) blockbuster exhibitions, was a sign that the Moscow Biennale had lost its rough-and-ready cutting-edge and settled into smooth-production routine. In fact, the Biennale has been on the slide since 2009 and the decision to shift it from the depths of Winter – when it was tough, off-the-cuff and utterly Russian – to late September, when it became just another event on the overcrowded artworld treadmill. Many things make Russia appealing, but trying to be mainstream isn’t one of them.

VDNKh was conceived as an exhibition park either side of World War II, and extends over an area the size of Monaco, hosting seventy palatial buildings (modestly dubbed ‘Pavilions’) in an eclectic neo-classical style. Many were originally devoted to the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, with ‘indigenous’ architecture to match. The result is an effete photogenic time-warp, freshly restored to shimmering glory.

Until two years ago the pavilions hosted tacky stalls peddling merchandise that had fallen off lorries – cheap mobiles, bootleg CDs etc. Now the merchants have been swept from its wedding-cake temples to be replaced by bars, restaurants and hi-tec exhibitions. The spacious alleys, lined with trees, fountains and golden statues, have become Moscovites’ favourite weekend destination and, on a sunny afternoon, as patriotic 1950s songs blare from the tannoy and summer frocks flutter in the breeze, you could easily imagine yourself back in the USSR. It is charming, and a little spooky.

On this late September Sunday, with the Biennale’s main show having vanished into thin air, I visited VDNKh’s Pavilion N°13 to inspect a whimsical exhibition staged under the Biennale’s umbrella, East / Deconstruction : columns clothed in coloured cellophane, patterns made from upside-down piala bowls, and Anastasia Kachalova’s dangling cylinders of black fabric evoking stylized hijab veils.

The yellow-walled Grain Pavilion, opened in 1939 but granted an Art Deco tower in 1954, was housing a twee photo exhibition entitled Friendship of Nations – all the nations, coincidentally, being former members of the USSR. I was more impressed by the intricately painted flowers and plants on the pavilion’s frosted glass windows (below left) . The cathedral-sized Cosmos Pavilion at the far end of the park with its majestic iron- and-glass dome (below centre) was housing a parade of vintage automobiles that seemed designed to prove that anything the Yanks could do, the Commies did better.

By now, back at Central Pavilion, Alexander Kutovoy (above centre) was busy at the top of the steps on a half-finished clay effigy entitled The End of Modernism in Russia , and the Moscow Biennale had finally opened its doors.

Inside, a ballerina was practising in front of mirrors-on-wheels; an artist was dashing off monochrome portraits of visitors; Els Dietvorst’s assistants were putting the finishing teeth (roughly-hewn wooden figures) to her sackcloth Skull (below left) ; and a poster- like image entitled Centre of Eurasia by Almagul Menlibayeva, one of the world’s most sophisticated video artists, had been strung up on scaffolding 15 feet off the ground, like some sort of advertisement (above right) . Scaffolding was everywhere you looked.

I reached for the Biennale’s 384-page catalogue to try and make sense of it all.

Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky, in his Welcome Address, announced that it had ‘been decided to significantly expand the scope of the Biennale.’ Really?

Commissioner Joseph Backstein placed that remark in context. ‘The curators’ he declared in his Foreword ‘have made a considered decision to place the accent on the Discussion section of the programme.’

In other words: Less Art, More Waffle.

Next up was a 12-page spiel from the Biennale’s trio of international curators. Then one of them, Bart de Baere, director of the arid contemporary art museum in Antwerp, was let loose for another 16 pages to pontificate about ‘Eurasia.’ Then there was an essay on ‘Moon Time’ (sic) by someone I had never heard of, inanely concluding that ‘the kinds of activity and process proposed for VDNKh have their own logic.’

The Catalogue did not get around to Art until Page 120. It was, like the Biennale’s central show, entitled How to Gather? Acting in a Centre in a City in the Heart of the Island of Eurasia.

Rarely has such a torrent of drivel been spouted in 20 words.

Now 70, Commissioner Backstein – the name and title trill off the tongue like Sergeant Bilko or Inspector Maigret – has become the dinosaur of Russian contemporary art. He has run out of money, run out of ideas, and is running out of credibility. This convivial cove deserves an honourable retirement, with loads of medals for decades of stalwart and, in olden times, inspired service.

The Moscow Biennale ran – blink and you’d missed it – from September 22-October 1. Ten days that did not shake the artworld.

But I was not unduly dismayed by my encounter with Central Pavilion. One of the worst things about any Moscow Biennale is the pick-and-mix smorgasbord internationalism of its main exhibition.

The best thing about the Moscow Biennale is the plethora of side-shows that happen in its wake, for which the Biennale tries to steal the credit by assigning them to such vacuous categories as Special Projects , Parallel Programme or Collateral Events . The Biennale catalogue listed 70 satellite shows in all.

These shows happen all across Moscow, often in places far from any Metro or even bus stop. But there were two just around the corner from the Central Pavilion, down an alley along which I had failed to venture on any of my previous half-dozen visits to VDNKh. The venue was the Kinopanorama, a circular cinema built in 1959.

The main show here – a tidy but drab array of dull-toned photos and paintings – failed to exploit the spectacular architecture, unlike Svetlana Shuvayeva’s subtle display of dummies in chintz dresses, inspired by the 1996 Czech film Margaritki . These dummies were placed at regular intervals along the glass-windowed corridor around the hall’s circumference. The dresses, sewn by Shuvayeva herself and embroidered with her own neo-Constructivist designs, hovered between flimsy vulgarity and Soviet chic – uncannily in sync with the mood of VDNKh.

A star, in Shuvayeva, is born, but who can save the Moscow Biennale? Probably only Dasha Zhukova – but she has kept her distance since 2009, when she hosted the main show at the Garage but was not asked to co-curate. Meanwhile she has had other priorities, like revamping Gorky Park. I headed there next.

Zhukova’s latest Garage opened in June, 600 yards from its temporary predecessor. It is abundantly sign-posted, just as well because the rectangular blockhaus conjured up by Rotterdam’s Rem Koolhaas is so austerely minimalist you could pass right in front of it without noticing (especially as the entrance is round the back).

SPIDER OUTSIDE THE GARAGE SPIDER INSIDE THE KREMLIN (courtesy The Moscow Times )

The New Garage began life as a 1960s restaurant called Времена Года (The Seasons). Koolhaas has ignored the original ground-floor arcades and panoramic upper windows to clad the whole shebang in silvery polycarbonate – creating a sleek, monotonous, anaemic contrast to the flashy ostentation of today’s new Moscow buildings.

The best thing about the New Garage is the restaurant. For just over a fiver you can enjoy humus with peppers, cucumber, pitta bread and a glass of Russian white. This is a nice surprise. Russian bars and restaurants rarely sell Russian wine or beer, even though Russia has admirable vineyards and excellent breweries. Fancy a Baltika or a Nevskoye ? No chance. All they serve in ‘smart places’ is eurodrizzle like Heineken or Carlsberg.

Upstairs was Vadim Zakharov’s Postscript After RIP: A Video Archive of Moscow Artists ’ Exhibitions 1989-2014 , consisting of 26 plastic coffins (one per year) arranged in rows, each containing a screen showing grainy video footage of Moscow artists arriving at exhibitions, talking to each other at exhibitions, and drinking together at exhibitions. The Stakhanovist Zakharov chronicled 230 group and solo exhibitions in all. The result is tedious beyond imagining – shattering fond beliefs that these artists were heroically and rebelliously disinterested rather than narcissistically aware of their own importance.

The New Garage had opened with a bigger bang: a wide-ranging and superbly displayed exhibition (through 7 February 2016) devoted to Louise Bourgeois , headlined by a menacing giant spider on the concourse outside. The other international superstar in town as a ‘Special Guest’ of the Moscow Biennale was Anish Kapoor, with works at the ‘original’ Garage (now Jewish Museum) through January 17. But (a) I hadn’t come to Moscow to see Anish Kapoor, (b) the Garage is a pain to get to (Metro, walk, tram); and (c) I’d already seen Kapoor in the Garage anyway, during the Moscow Biennale of 2009.

My next stop was the Manezh – where a Biennale Special Project entitled Our Land/Alien Territory occupied the basement. The Manezh is so vast a space that not even works by 30 international artists can fill it, although America’s Dan Peterman had a go, littering the floor with hundreds of sandbags camouflaged as cushions. Nearby were pieces of furniture dangling from wire, a map of Transnistria and some photos of Putin.

Two works stood out: Kristina Romanova’s ingenious glass-print installation on Abkhazia (detail above right) ; and Parallax , a bewitching three-channel video by Pakistan’s Shahzia Sikander, first shown at the Sharjah Biennial in 2013 (above centre) . This offered an essentially abstract contrast to the other blockbuster video being screened in town: AES+F’s Inverso Mundus at OIga Sviblova’s Multimedia Art Centre. I had seen Inverso Mundus at the Venice Biennale in May and, while admiring its trademark technical wizardry and classical soundtrack, been unwowed by its failure to break new ground. AES+F are starting to parody AES+F.

Meanwhile the main hall at the Manezh was hosting an exhibition commemorating Seventy Years of the Russian Nuclear Industry , subtitled (with a modesty that former inhabitants of Chernobyl might find hard to stomach) A Chain Reaction Of Success . Among its ‘unique documents and exhibits’ were a bust of Stalin on a desk beneath a portrait of Lenin; a map of Russia threatened by American bombers from all directions (below left) , whose lasting political message was all too obvious; and the AN-302 hydrogen bomb detonated in 1961. This ‘most powerful weapon in human history’ was the most popular spot in the show: the perfect backcloth for selfies and kiddy photos.

Not so long ago – during the short-lived directorship of Marina Loshak (2012/13) – the Manezh seemed to be carving out an identity as an innovative cultural venue rather than a haven for propaganda. But in Summer 2013 Loshak was promoted to become Head of the Pushkin Museum (the Moscow Louvre), where her background in modern art was evident during the Biennale, both inside – with a show of openwork metal versions of Rembrandt works by the indefatigable Dmitry Gutov – and out. The museum’s colonnaded façade was fronted by Alexander Ponomaryov’s Windtruvian Man (left) : an installation of giant red-and-blue windsocks powered into permanent erection, like guns of war symbolically targeting… Mariupol, perhaps? Or maybe the Kremlin. The Pushkin is also home (until November 29) to a magnificent exhibition devoted to the Paris immigré artists Pascin & Foujita , curated by Benoît Sapiro of Galerie Le Minotaure. Highlight is a trio of large, boldly colourful paintings by Pascin, lent by French private collectors and never seen in public. Of specific Russian interest is a section on Pascin’s influence over Moscow artists, notably Tatiana Mavrina (1900-96).

Smart museums are all very well, but for Contemporary Art you can’t beat a grungy, inaccessible venue where anything goes. That’s how next day I found myself outside Ulitsa 1905 Goda metro station, admiring its elephantine outcrop of Socialist Realist demonstrators (left) , before plodding down a windswept boulevard and getting lost in pursuit of a derelict textiles plant called Trekhgornaya Manufaktura. I slumped into a café, or tried to; the entry turned out to be a small room with large front window and a pretty young lady lolling over her nails like an Amsterdam pro. She looked up languidly, pressed a button and the bookcase behind her span open to reveal a spiral staircase.

The elusive Trekhgornaya Manufaktura was not on the street given as its address (a not uncommon occurrence in Moscow), in fact it was not on any street at all, but buried in an industrial complex in the throes of gentrification, i.e. with karaoke lounge and Irish pub. I had missed the entrance by about 400 yards.

The exhibition was called Nadezhda (Hope) and had been put together by Simon Mraz, Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow. I had been tipped off about this unfindable show by Donatien de Rochambeau, Kitai Gorod’s favourite French aristocrat, chef and comic-strip specialist. Perhaps not surprisingly, I was the only person there.

By the entrance was a 15-foot Art Deco metal pine-cone by Ira Korina, entitled Ivanovo , its nooks and crannies cradling red flowers. It looked like it had fallen off the Chrysler Building.

But most of Nadezhda involved views of Russian industrial cities by Russian and foreign photographers. Blow-ups created a bit of ambiance, but most of the images would have looked just as good in a magazine. The use of flattened corrugated iron as the background for some photographs (below left) looked magnificent, but having to enter some galleries through a turnstile seemed weird.

I was about to leave, somewhat underwhelmed, when I stumbled across a hall in the back corner of the factory hidden away like Aladdin’s cave. With the factory walls left bare and in shadow, the focus was on the concrete floor, rusting green pillars, and two sweeping white partitions at right-angles to one another, one embellished with folded sheets of aluminium by Andreas Fogarasi.

A Revolving Door (right) in steel, plaster and Indian ink, by fellow-Austrian Cäcilia Brown, hung between two pillars; a mohair tapestry, by Holland’s Susanne Kriemann, between two more. This was called Ruda (iron ore), and portrayed a ‘future relief’ of the industrial hell-hole of Magnitogorsk.

I finally twigged that the show’s Nadezhda title was sarcastic, and that Mraz was targeting the hopelessness of Russia’s industrialized excess.

Dominating the hall was Norilsk Substance by Dmitry Kawarga: a grungy mass of twisted grey and black rags and tubing, symbolizing the 280 miles of tunnelling at Norilsk in northern Siberia – a ‘closed city’ until as recently as 2001 whose mine, as Kawarga specified in an accompanying note, was worked by 300,000 Gulag inmates. Kawarga’s shambling monstrosity, about the size of a small car, was topped by a whimsical plastic roof and lent unusual colour by orange wire and turquoise rods.

A couple of green and orange puddles had formed alongside, as if the monster had sprung a leak. An attendant seeped out from nowhere to refuel the artwork with a large bottle of mineral water. Within a few minutes the puddles started to grow, looking more toxic than ever.

Offering a clinical contrast, just a few feet away, were rows of Mondrian-like coloured geometric patterns on white canvases of diminishing sizes: stylized street views of Vyksa , a small steelworks town east of Moscow, by Mish-Mash (Misha Leykin & Masha Sumnina). I have had my eye on these unsung superstars of Russian art for some time: everything they do is as cerebral, coherent and deceptively imaginative as a Bach fugue.

The ‘Kawarga Room’ was infinitely superior to the Biennale’s Central Pavilion at VDNKh, with its ballerina and tatty scaffolding. I don’t suppose many of Commissioner Backstein’s VIPs made it out to Trekhgornaya, though.

Another Biennale show was taking place in more genteel surrounds – the Decorative Arts Museum on Delegatskaya, a mecca for Russian lacquer-work and Soviet porcelain. Intervention required contemporary artists like Konstantin Zvezdochotov (left) or Ira Korina (right) to sneak their own works among existing museum displays, and blend in with/ aesthetically challenge venerable artworks decades or centuries old.

Zvezdochotov (born 1958) rose to prominence in the 1980s, but another – and undoubtedly greater – Non-Conformist shirked the limelight, and had never come to my attention: Boris Kocheyshvili (born 1940), whose works have a sort of a mystical figurativism that defies categorization. He is being rescued from comparative oblivion by Tamara Vyekhova (below left) , who had laid on an enthralling non-Biennale exhibition in the foyer of the theatre of the School of Dramatic Art (below centre) – a building of rare post-Soviet wit, designed by Anatoly Vasiliev and Igor Popov, opened in 2001.

The effervescent Vekhova recently opened Здесь (‘Here’) Gallery in an ugly 1970s block across Prechistinka from Zurab Tsereteli’s Academy of Art. I have passed the building dozens of times but never looked at, let alone ventured in. It houses a number of galleries. Vekhova’s, with its low ceiling, dark wood panelling and mezzanine office- space, is unexpectedly cosy (above right) . Its donnish, Old English feel makes it well- suited to the art talks and wine-tastings Vekhova hosts for her discerning clientèle.

An even newer addition to the Moscow gallery scene is Artwin , opened in February by Mariana and Madina Gogova. The twins had already staged several shows in temporary spaces before opening their 130m 2 gallery close to the Turandot and Café Pushkin restaurants (Maison Dellos, which runs both, is the gallery’s ‘strategic partner’). Yet fears that the fashion-sistas would pander to tussovka taste appear unfounded. During the 6 th Moscow Biennale Artwin laid on a show of wit and subtlety devoted to three young artists (below left) . Called Inside An Event , it featured Alexei Mandych’s Animal Farm Symphony , comprising sixty digital watches on metal rods all showing the same time; Alexei Korsi’s Celestial Chancellery – a permanently smouldering cigarette; and a mesmerizing 10-minute video of men and women in a hauntingly lit Pool by Polina Kanis, who shot to prominence at the wonderful First Cadets Corpus group show in St Petersburg last year.

Artwin or Art one ? Perhaps the gallery should be renamed, because last May Madina Gogova was appointed Culture Minister of her native republic, Karachay-Cherkessia in Russia’s northern Caucasus, leaving Mariana to go it alone. That hasn’t stopped the gallery opening a new exhibition space in Baku, or pursuing their interests across the Caspian. In August the versatile Olya Kroitor, Artwin’s flagship artist, performed Fulcrum outside Almaty railway station, standing motionless on top of a 15-foot pole for two-and-a-half hours. The Gogovas – who staged an excellent Oksana Mas show in Almaty a year ago – also work with two of Kazakhstan’s finest artists, Almagul Menlibayeva and Gulnur Mukazhanova.

It was in Almaty last year that I first met Dmitry Shorin . I had encountered his paintings at a solo show in St Petersburg’s Marble Palace in 2008, and saw a whole lot more in 2013, when reporting on Erarta Galleries. His slick brushwork and eye-easy subjects – usually teenage girls – mark him down as St Petersburg’s one-man answer to Dubosarsky & Vinogradov. He also produces plastic angels with aeroplane-wings, which Erarta use as mascots in their international outlets, and which even adorn St Petersburg’s new Pulkovo Airport. But I enjoy Shorin’s company, so one dark evening I tracked down Marina Obratsova’s Fine Art Gallery near Mayakovskaya (seven blocks and 600 yards from its boulevard address) for the opening of 2Я , his latest show. By the time I arrived all the vodka had been drunk, for which I hold Dima largely responsible, but there were still lots of aeroplanes and lots of girls – one with propellers in her hair.

For sheer quirkiness, however, even the great Shorin was outshone by a private performance by the Stas Namin Theatre of the legendary 1913 Suprematist opera Victory Over The Sun , laid on at the Udarnik cinema by dealer Vladimir Frolov and oil-pipeline tycoon Shalva Breus (one-time boss of the late lamented Art Chronika ). The performance (which premièred in Switzerland during this year’s Art Basel) had incredible gusto and Ubuesque anarchy, featuring Malevich costumes and Matyushin music played on two electric keyboards by young ladies facing the front of the stage. One of them got shot during the performance and was temporarily replaced by one of the actresses, who played the keyboard back-to-front on her knees with sublime nonchalance.

In contrast, the mood at the marble-floored Ekaterina Foundation is seldom less than hushed and sedate. As usual Ekaterina were contributing a couple of shows to the Biennale off programme. Downstairs was an uplifting little exhibition of psychedelic trees and snowboarders by Viktoriya Malkova & Polina Moskvina, irrelevantly entitled Suspense and marred only by an installation involving a dummy and a snowboard stuck in some polystyrene snow. Some canvases were playfully hung at right-angles in the room corners (left) .

Upstairs there was more of the narcissism witnessed at the Garage. Scenes From Russian [read Moscow] Art Life 1986-1992 involved a roomful of newspaper cuttings; cordoned-off galleries resembling rooms in an attic, piled with works of art that may or may not have been authentic; and a hall lined with grey banners every few feet jokily marked ISKUNSTVO , fluttering above black-and-white photos of old exhibitions for which Joseph Backstein’s curatorship was repeatedly thanked on large-lettered plaques. The historical theme echoed Elena Selina’s far superior exhibition Reconstruction at the Ekaterina Foundation in 2013, which comprehensively revisited the emergence of the Russian [read Moscow] contemporary art scene through reconstituted gallery displays and original artworks.

The final Scenes exhibit was a grey board displaying 61 oval mugshots beneath a banner reading Rebyata c Nashego Dvora (‘Kids from our Block’). This was meant to be a parody of an old-style Soviet group photo, but the humour got lost in the self-importance and the hierarchy, with Kabakov, Bulatov, Vasiliev, Chuikhov and Nekrasov forming the top row. There were 59 artists in all, plus two curators: Backstein high up, Erofeyev low down. I fear the rankings may have provoked more than a little confraternal jealousy.

It irks me to see the Non-Conformists conforming to the dictates of vanity, image- consciousness and self-glorification – whatever the art historical interest of the documentary material dredged up for this type of exhibition (which would be far more useful in a book). There is a prevalent mood of nostalgia that seems to herald the end of a happier and more adventurous era. I was reminded of the giant 1985 photograph in the Russian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, pointing out – or rather boasting – that four of the Moscow Conceptualists featured on it had since been officially canonized, i.e. selected to represent Russia [read Moscow] in the Giardini.

Like the Ekaterina Foundation, Vinzavod – site of a former industrial winery – opened in 2007 and has been the city’s major contemporary art complex ever since, hosting both galleries and non-commercial exhibitions. Strangely it has never been the main venue of the Biennale. I suspect politics and egos have much to do with that, and the fact that biennales are run by curators and museum-people, who tend to consider themselves morally superior to gallery-owners. The organizers of this year’s Moscow Biennale, for instance, made no attempt to contact Alex Sharov, boss of 11.12 Gallery – the only gallery present in both Moscow and Asia (Singapore). No one would have been better placed then Sharov to contribute to or advise a Russian event based on the concept of ‘Eurasia.’ Vinzavod staged two exhibitions as part of this year’s Moscow Biennale. Its Lower Hall had a messy, disparate show called Leaving Tomorrow that looked as if it had been put together by first-year A- level students – although I thank its bloated pink pig for memories of Pink Floyd and Battersea Power Station.

But there was a superb exhibition in the Upper Hall: No Time , underwritten by the Sorokin Foundation and imaginatively curated by Vladimir Logutov with V-shaped and diagonal walls. Despite the odd photograph or installation (including one by the versatile Sveta Shutayeva), the emphasis was on paintings – both by reasonably established artists (Valery Chtak, Vlad Yurashko, Valentin Tkach, Pavel Otdelnov) and emerging ones: Vladimir Potapov (below left) , Kirill Garshin and Leonid Tskhe (below right) .

I have known Vinzavod in buoyant mood at weekends, but there was a glum, half-empty feel on this Autumn Sunday, not helped by several galleries (XL, Pechersky, Proun) being closed, and another (Pop-Off) open but unmanned. Gallery 21 had some thoughtful photographs by the Russo-Swedish Natasha Dahnberg; Regina amber-encrusted Scythian-inspired carvings by Evgeny Anutfiev; and Triangle colourful works by Evgeny Kukoverov.

But 11-12 had the best show, involving Vasily Slonov’s facetious iron head-dresses and his axes engraved with Russian leaders. Slonov surged to notoriety in 2013, when his irreverent Sochi Olympics posters were displayed by Marat Guelman in Perm – prompting Guelman’s sacking as head of the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art.

Guelman’s Vinzavod gallery Z + L was showing recent, more demure, works by the prolific Natalia Nesterova (left) , whose style has hardly changed for decades.

Guelman was back in the news on October 27, announcing that his Vinzavod gallery was being shut down in response to the charity auction it hosted on October 18 in aid of people jailed for taking part in an anti-Putin rally. Guelman received immediate support from the London-based Russian collector Igor Tsukanov, who wrote to Vinzavod owner Sofia Trotesnko urging her to back down and promising to act as a ‘guarantor’ that the gallery would continue to ‘stage exhibitions and serve as a small island of cultural freedom’ (Guelman was also accused of using his Vinzavod premises as an advice centre for would-be emigrants to Montenegro, where he now lives).

Tsukanov’s noble efforts proved to no avail. Sofia’s billionaire husband Roman is close to Moscow’s political élite, and relations with Guelman have frayed beyond repair. Guelman has no plans to open another space in the capital. ‘It’s not a good time to start anything new in Moscow’ he observes drily.

Art censorship in Russia used to seem more religious than political, perpetrated less by the Kremlin than the Orthodox Church. For example: it was religious zealotry (spiced with in-house jealousy) that did for Erofeyev at the New Tretyakov in 2008. But as Russia grows ever-more totalitarian, with its zombie-box media peddling propaganda of shameless dishonesty, art is inevitably in the political firing-line. The situation has worsened dramatically since the presidential ‘election’ of 2012.

In 2013, just after Guelman was downed in Perm, police closed a St Petersburg exhibition by Konstantin Altunin due to its unflattering images of leading politicians (right) . The artist fled to France. Meanwhile respected curator Katya Degot learnt she was considered a potential extremist because she had taught Pussy Riot’s Ekaterina Samutsevich at the Rodchenko Art School.

Last year I experienced political pressure myself. In early 2014 one of Moscow’s leading galleries asked me to recommend an East European artist for a show commemorating the centenary of World War One. I suggested a truculent Romanian with a powerful graphic style. His works criticized various wars, including that in Chechnya, and lampooned a number of warlords, including Putin. But the gallery’s ‘international curator’ – a young woman with beautiful English, limited artworld experience and a gloating delight in the recent annexation of Crimea – took exception to the work featuring Putin, and to an anti-Putin comment the artist had made in my catalogue interview with him. Out they went.

When I expressed my disquiet to the gallery owner, he insisted that censorship was not gallery policy and that the work (and comment) would be reinstated (they weren’t). ‘But come on,’ he concluded mockingly, ‘is Putin really such a bad guy?’

The only place you are allowed to answer that question honestly is outside the country. As at this year’s Venice Biennale – where the main show in the Arsenale, All The World’s Futures , saw St Petersburg’s Gluklya express some hometruths on poles bearing Clothes for Demonstrators against a Phoney Election – including this pair of trousers (left) with their embroidered call for a Россия без Путина (Russia Without Putin).

Culture, in today’s Russia, is a matter not of the Future but the Past – a vehicle for State propaganda in classic Communist tradition. Three Moscow shows rammed home that point last year. Within weeks of the annexation, ArtPlay was hosting an exhibition of jolly photos of Russian leaders from Nicholas II to Putin, all enjoying themselves in Nash Krim (‘Our Crimea’). The art collection of the Russian Interior Ministry – full of 21 st century Socialist Realist paintings of gun-toting ‘Polite People’ – went on show at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. And Myth of the Beloved Leader , in the former Lenin Museum, displayed roomfuls of sculptures, portraits, posters and ‘artworks’ glorifying Lenin and Stalin – with both given equal billing.

This year’s celebrations of the 70 th anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War II have offered fresh opportunities to eulogize Stalin – while concealing his cosying-up to the Nazis in 1939 (via the Ribbentrop Pact) and his catastrophic failure to heed intelligence about imminent Nazi invasion in 1941. I was not surprised when Moscow’s Gulag Museum, where Stalin got it in the chops, was shut down earlier this year. Although it has just reopened in a different spot, I doubt its collection of savagely accusatory paintings – notably those of Nikolai Getman (his view of a Stalin-surveyed camp in Magadan appears right ), a political prisoner in the Gulag from 1946-53 – will have survived the move unscathed.

VDNKh’s lavish recent restoration, while architecturally laudable, was motivated primarily by its associations with USSR glory days under Stalin. The choice as the focal venue of this year’s Moscow Biennale of its Central Pavilion – whose epic plaster frieze by Evgeny Vuchetich, Glory to the Soviet People (left) , has become a high altar of a nationalist nostalgia – cannot, therefore, be viewed as anything other than political, and the same applies to its ‘Eurasian’ theme. Forget Peter the Great’s ‘Window on the West’: today’s Russia looks east to China (or south to Syria) rather than to Europe, where its best friends are Berlusconi and Transnistria.

* On that happy note, I left Moscow and headed East. First, along the Guelman Trail, to Perm. Thence to Ekaterinburg, beyond the Urals, in search of Eurasia. 

II : PERM TWO FROM THREE

In 2008 Marat Guelman rode into Perm to give it a ‘Glasgow-style cultural rebranding.’ A museum of contemporary art (the first in Russia outside Moscow or St Petersburg), dubbed PERMM, was the main feature – aiming to do for Perm what Gehry’s Guggenheim had done for Bilbao. For nearly five years under Guelman, the new museum hosted a busy programme of high-calibre shows. Guelman also arranged for PERMM to receive a collection of Moscow Conceptualist works, and helped launch a ‘White Nights’ culture festival across the city. His headline-grabbing stay was always likely to end at high noon.

In 2012 Oleg Chirkunov, the independent-minded Regional Governor who had brought Guelman to Perm, was dismissed by the Kremlin (he has since moved to France). Moscow loyalists began gunning for Guelman, led by new regional culture supremo Igor Gladnev. The final shoot-out took place in June 2013, when Guelman hosted a Vasily Slonov exhibition lampooning Putin’s Olympics, called Welcome to Sochi 2014!

By Western standards, Slonov’s mock posters – including Olympic rings made of barbed wire or transformed into nooses – were pithy, pointed, sometimes trite, often hilarious and nothing to get hot under the kaftan about. But in Perm they lasted just two days – and another exhibition due to open shortly afterwards, Russian Baroque , was not allowed to go ahead at all, as it contained photographs of anti-Putin street protests. The PERMM museum offices were raided, insinuations made about embezzlement, and Guelman drummed out of town.

Gladnev had behaved like the KGB, snorted Guelman, adding: ‘The new trend of Russian politics is to divide everyone into groups of Us And Them. The small islands of liberalism are getting smaller.’

Perm – rechristined Molotov from 1940-57 – is both Wild West (or Wild East) and Middle- Of-Nowhere. The 720-mile flight from Moscow ends in an overgrown portacabin that serves as the Arrivals Terminal. The city centre is grim. The main street is called Sovietskaya. On my first night I visited three (good) restaurants and was the only diner. I had one course in each, to spread custom. Most people in this non-bustling city of one million want away (the population has fallen by 100,000 since the end of Communism).

The venue Guelman used for the museum, the city’s Rechnoy Vokzal (River Terminal), was closed down (ostensibly for safety reasons) shortly after he had gone, and PERMM forcibly relocated to a curious three-storey triangular building alongside a disused nuclear bunker towards the city outskirts (above left) .

When I visited it was closed – although that was not as sinister as it sounds.

Two temporary exhibitions were in the offing. One with works lent by the Yarat Foundation in Azerbaijan, another devoted to Spanish street artist Escif – who, insisted the museum’s new Artistic Director Nailya Allakhverdieva, was ‘almost as big as Banksy.’

I doubt Banksy would agree to an exhibition of his work taking the form of a few drawings displayed on formica tables next to potted plants (see left) , but it says something for the reputation established by Guelman that PERMM is still able to attract exhibitions of international art.

Even so, with three floors at its disposal, why doesn’t the museum assign at least one to its collection of Conceptualist Art? That way it could stay open every day, too, rather than shutting down between exhibitions.

I didn’t bother to ask Ms Allakhverdieva. I felt she was not in a position to give a frank answer.

‘We take a critical approach these days, not a radical one’ she stressed.

I did, though, ask Ms Allakhverdieva about the closure last March of the Gulag camp Perm 36 , located 80 miles north-east of the city. She dismissed it as an ‘administrative measure.’

Perm 36 continue to house political prisoners until 1987, and was reopened a decade later for visitors by a private, non-commercial organization called the Memorial Centre of Political Repression . It is the sole Gulag camp from Stalin’s era to survive intact, and was expected to gain UNESCO World Heritage status before its recent closure. This was reported in the international media as yet another example of the current Russian regime’s attempts to airbrush the awkward bits out of Russian history.

Ms Allakhverdieva (above) also informed me, in a doubtful voice, that PERMM would return to Rechnoy Vokzal once it had been renovated.

I went to have a look. Rechnoy Vokzal, on the banks of the River Kama (here over half-a-mile wide), was opened in 1940 – the last building designed by the Constructivist Alexander Grinberg (1881-1938), and his only one in ‘Stalin Imperial Style,’ complete with pilasters, giant columns, arched windows, a central block resembling a triumphal arch, and an interior with coffered ceilings, marble pillars and mosaic floors. It boasted an hotel and restaurant as well as the offices of the Kama River Shipping Company, and served as a River Terminal until 2004.

It stands opposite the city’s original railway station, Perm 1 – now used only for local services, yet being restored to frilly Tsarist glory.

Although its last exhibition – Transit Zone , an outstanding array of site- commissioned Street Art – closed its doors only 18 months ago, Rechnoy Vokzal (shown above right in its Guelmanist heyday) looks as if it is being left comprehensively to rot (see recto-verso views, left) .

The white stucco of its Stalinist colonnades is peeling off. Red bricks poke out from underneath. Windows are broken. Weeds scramble from the roof. The steps are boarded up.

Opposite them, a slogan in ten-foot high red letters remains by the waterside: СЧАСТЬЕ НЕ ЗА ГОРАМИ – ‘happiness is not far away.’ Or, more literally, ‘is not to be found over the hills’ – perhaps a reference to Perm’s rival Ekaterinburg across the Urals. Either way it sounds bitter and ironic. These letters, and the witty trompe-l’oeil arches, capitals and balustrades that embellish the landing jetty, are all that remain of the River Terminal’s brush with art. It is hard to imagine that for five brief years the venue swam with some of the biggest fish in the contemporary art world.

‘Perm’s golden age…’ mused Anastasia Kazakhova, my guide for the afternoon. ‘We’ll never see such times again.’ It was cold and dank. I asked her about Perm 36 . ‘Administrative measure?’ she scoffed. ‘They just wanted to please Putin. But it’s probably backfired. He can’t be thrilled with all the bad publicity.’

We continued along the riverside promenade, past the Baku Gardens open-air café, where blaring pop music and two bouncer-sized waiters had attracted a clientèle yet to emerge into single figures. The smart, new, granite-paved promenade was just as empty. After two-thirds of a mile we found out why: it was blocked off by construction work. We retraced our steps and caught a tram to the Museum of Soviet Naïve Art (above left) .

This was staging an eccentric show in honour of Ekaterinburg artist B.U. Kashkin (born Evgeny Malakhin , 1938-2005), with an excellent portrait of him by Katerina Poyedinschikova, and contributions from such Russian anti-establishment figures as Blue Noses. Graffiti on the landing outside (right) pointedly informed visitors that the museum existed without any support from Perm’s Regional Culture Ministry. I could feel the Guelman spirit here far more forcefully than at the new PERMM.

The politics of the Perm artworld also reared their head at the city Art Museum , housed opposite (at least for now) in an old church. The sumptuous collection includes masterworks by Briullov, Kramskoy, Vasiliev, Shishkin, Vereschagin, Grabar, Lentulov and this superb Female Portrait from 1914 by Serov’s pupil Piotr Kelin (right) , whom I had never heard of. Plus a roomful of exquisite icons.

The museum was also, when I visited, hosting an ‘exhibition tribute’ to sculptor Leonid Baranov (born 1943). Baranov (below centre) ranks close to Zurab Tsereteli in terms of talent, but fortunately the exhibition was merely sprinkled with his ghastly busts of fellow-artists (Tsereteli included, below right ) rather than submerged in them. There were paintings by Realists, Non- Conformists and Kitschmeisters – the best by Tatiana Nazarenko (below left) , Ksenia Nachitailo, Dmitry Zhilinisky and Vasily Sitnikov. But what was an exhibition of contemporary art doing in Perm’s Old Master museum? Why wasn’t it in the PERMM Contemporary Museum?

Doubtless because it had previously been shown in Moscow, at the Academy presided over by Zurab Tsereteli – a man who would sooner forego a grillfull of shashlik than have anything to do with anything connected with Marat Guelman.

Meanwhile, across the street, next to a quirky mural dated 1982 , Maris Art Gallery had a show commemorating the 90 th anniversary of local Figurativist Ivan Borisov (1925-95). His watercolours were charming, some even arresting, but the hanging was wonky and the spotlights directed at the floor. This, in scores of cities of across Russia, is the only type of art gallery that exists.

Perm also has a musical tradition. Serge Diaghilev spent his youth here, in a mansion high up Sibirskaya that you cannot visit, and a Diaghilev Festival is held in Perm every Summer. I was shown around the opera-house by Anastasia, who works there as a translator. They were getting ready for Boris Godunov . We saw the enthrallingly old- fashioned dressmakers’ and pump-makers’ rooms, the set-designer’s studio, the ballet rehearsal hall under the roof and, behind the stage, the red brick wall of the original, smaller Tsarist theatre.

‘When they were rebuilding, they found layer after layer of broken glass under the orchestra pit’ Anastasia told me. ‘It was an old trick for improving the acoustics.’

Perm Opera was rebuilt in 1955. As a listed building the Opera receives handsome grants for upkeep. Its porticoed, neo-Stalinist exterior is freshly painted. Bizarrely, the back wall of the Opera is not listed, gets no money, and is not upkept.

So Opera bigwigs chortled Da! when Los Angeles artist Lawrence Mota offered to decorate it in 2013 while he was in Perm for Purcell’s Indian Queen – in a staging by fellow-American Peter Sellars, who had enrolled Mota as ‘Assistant Visual Artist.’ The graffitified mess Mota made of the Opera’s rear suggests the last word in his title needs treating with caution.

That night I went to Boris Godunov . Joanna Lumley attended the same opera on the Perm leg of her recent Trans-Siberian TV documentary. She and her cameraman had a box to themselves; I had a £12 seat in the third row of the stalls. Excellent value and the performance was solid, though I was disappointed that it was the ‘Preliminary’ two-act version rather than the ‘Definitive’ four-act one, depriving us of one of the great opera endings – the plaintive tenor lament by the Yurodivy (Holy Fool):

Soon darkness will descend… Woe to Russia … Weep, weep, Russian people…

Tears for fears: is even Mussorgsky censored in contemporary Russia? 

III : EKATERINBURG’S BIG PARADE

I followed Joanna Lumley in reverse, taking the Trans-Siberian from Perm 2, its unfrilly Communist-era station, to Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, population 1.35 million.

I was looking for the Urals, those mighty mountains that form the legendary barrier between Europe and Asia. All I found were low-lying hills, tawny fields, partly evergreen forests and occasional outbursts of shantytown housing.

My reason for visiting Ekaterinburg was the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art. I had been invited to the first two, in 2010 and 2013, but been unable to come. A Ural Biennial sounded exotic, not least because the event had the reputation for being staged in Constructivist factories.

The 2015 Ural Biennial was open for two months, not ten days (September 9 – November 10), and its subtitle, Mobilization , was 19 words shorter than the Moscow Biennale’s. Good start. The main show was being held in the Iset Hotel – a Constructivist masterpiece that opened as a Secret Police residence in 1932 before being transformed in the 1950s into a hotel known first as Sport , later as Iset (after the local river) before closing for restoration in 2013. The bathrooms remain intact (complete with Soviet fittings), and the ground floor now hosts an excellent self-service restaurant, but I was unable to ascertain whether the building will resume as an hotel after the Biennial. Its semi-circular ground-plan purportedly apes the outline of a Sickle – although the building is known locally, or luckily, as ‘The Horseshoe.’ Its curved corridors overlook the adjacent 1930s housing blocks of the Gorodok Chekistov (‘Chekhist Enclave,’ below centre ).

The Biennial had designated eight floors and no fewer than 76 hotel rooms – as many as the trombones in the Big Parade – as Spaces for Manoeuvre. Echoing the ‘Eurasian ’ theme of the Moscow Biennale, artists were mainly Russian or Chinese. The curators were China ’s Li Zhenhua and Serbia-born, Shanghai-based Biljana Ciric. Full marks for their zany concept but the result was inevitably erratic. Imagination was in short supply.

One room was smothered in Chinese pictograms (above centre) , another with mirrors (above left) , a third with sheets of paper strewn across the floor. Slava P had plastered walls, floor and ceiling with faces cut from advertising posters. The Zlye Group had cleverly – but not, I fear, very originally – fitted out their room with furniture, TV and curtains made from barbed-wire (above right) .

There was a video-screen of repeated Warhol Maos , and a dozen TV-sets regurgitating videos about Ai Weiwei. If you had ever dreamed of seeing the portly Chinese cause célèbre dancing Gangnam -style, this was your chance.

A video of a bare-chested lady-boxer lurked in a room, protected by two age-restriction signs in the corridor outside. One read 16+ , one read 18+ . One per breast?

Liao Wenfeng’s & Bignia Wehrli’s Egg Decision-Making Device (assessed by a bemused dame below right ) offered a jocular contrast, as did a Marta Popivoda & Ana Vujanovic installation, Mass Ornament , that centred on a grainy video of the 1987 Yugoslavia Youth Day Celebration in Belgrade’s Partizan Stadium (below left) .

Somewhat to my relief I missed a ‘performance,’ slyly entitled Deprussion , by Anastasia Baranova & Anastasia Estaulova – who spent the first day of the Biennial branding fearless visitors with a tiny, blood red tattoo reading Made in Russia .

Young Russian female artists were behind much of the finest work. Svetlana Shuvayeva – after her VDNKh textiles and Vinzavod installation – was represented here by stylized works on paper evoking Crowd Personality. With her compositional understatement and graphic precision, she is an heir to Bulatov and Kabakov (see next page top left) .

Textiles here took the form of Zhenya Machneva’s tapestries portraying metal figures produced at the venerable Kasly cast-iron factory 60 miles south of Ekaterinburg (below right) . One of the few oil paintings was Ekaterina Poyedinschikova’s Vrubelesque Master’s Dream , from her Malachite Mountain series – but its striking palette was done no favours by being juxtaposed with a floorful of garish spaghetti knitwear by Where Dogs Run (Russian artists love to give themselves names that sound like 1960s pop groups).

The corridors themselves came in for artistic treatment. One was lined with Alisa Yoffe’s black-and-white ‘Punk’ paintings inspired by Red Brigades terrorist Margherita Cagol (above centre) . Coloured filters had been mysteriously applied to the corridor windows on Floor 5.

The most successful installation (see top right) , Fedor Telkov’s Domestication , fused the hotel-room context with the Biennial’s industrial raison-d’être – combining an ironic reproduction of cosy living-quarters of workers at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station (30 miles east of Ekaterinburg) with intimidating photos of the potentially lethal machinery they handle on a daily basis.

I was dismayed that industrial premises played a minimal role in this year’s Industrial Biennial. To make matters worse, my guide contrived to take me to the principal industrial venue, Ural Khimmash (photos previous page) when it was closed. Suburban Khimmash (the delightful name has nothing to do with Mr Kipling potatoes but stands for Chemical Engineering ), a 90-minute round-trip from the city-centre, has some of the architectural swagger of Nova Hutta near Cracov, another purpose-built industrial town.

I had been luckier, the night before, to be among the hundred or so spectators ushered by torchlight through the crumbling, abandoned halls of the Dom Pechaty Constructivist printing-works (left) to experience Valery Shergin’s The Breach : six exhilarating tableaux (complete with music and dance) performed by members of the Kolyada and Ekaterinburg Youth Theatres, evoking the terror and desperate gaiety of the Stalinist ’30s (see photos above) . This event could never have happened in the U.K. (due to namby-pamby health and safety regulations) or Moscow (for political reasons).

Dom Pechaty stands on Prospekt Lenina, the blockbuster boulevard that slices the city in two. It is one of Eurasia’s great streets, lined with a battlefleet of Constructivist buildings, including a Post Office shaped like a tractor. Jacob Sverdlov – the Communist henchman after whom the city was long misnamed – is perched halfway down, between the lilac-walled Tsarist opera-house and the grey-brown Stalinist university (below left) .

Sverdlov is jabbing dismissively at some hapless minion from atop a pedestal modelled on Peter the Great’s block of granite in St Petersburg. Further on comes the frilly neo- Gothic Governor’s green and pink Residence then, across City Pond (a sizable lake), the Stalinist City Hall (bottom right) , where Stakhanovist statues man the balustrades.

Despite the abundance of monuments to its Soviet past, there is a whiff of non-bolshy independence to Ekaterinburg that comes partly from being nearly a thousand miles from the capital and partly from having a maverick Mayor, Evgeny Royzman – elected against the Kremlin’s candidate in 2013 after claiming the city was being ‘run by outsiders.’ Royzman is now the highest-ranking opposition figure in Russia. Long may he avoid the Nemtsov treatment.

Royzman spent time in prison under the Communists and is best known for his unorthodox crackdown on drug dealers. He is also, more sedately, a prominent collector of Orthodox icons from the historic town of Nevyansk, 50 miles north of Ekaterinburg. His collection is crammed into a neon-lit Icon Museum (above left) on the first floor of a modern apartment block in central Ekaterinburg, up a staircase lined with an enormous phantasmagoria by local artist Misha Brusilovsky ( below right ).

I could not decide whether Brusilovsky (born 1931) was weird and wonderful or merely appalling, so was pleased to encounter another of his works at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (left) , and will stick with appalling. Both works, however, dated from the 1990s. Go backwards and Brusilovsky gets good. In his thirties he was a rebel. His quirky 1965 Footballers (below centre) fetched £108,000 at Sotheby’s London in 2006, while his Severe-style interpretation of a Lenin harangue from 1918 , co- authored with Gennady Mosin (below left) , caused a minor sensation at the 1966 Venice Biennale – when the accompanying figure of Kalinin was mistaken for Trotsky, who had not been seen in a Soviet painting since the 1920s. The confusion was probably intended.

The Ekaterinburg Contemporary Art Museum majors on paintings and sculpture post- dating 1990. The standard is woeful. Lowlights of my visit included a blue-and-white hooped Cow (2006) by Vasily Khannonov, of interest only to the most rabid QPR fan; and Maxim Titov’s Lucy from his series Life on the Margins (2010), showing a prostitute squatting on the sidewalk with her suspendered colleagues gaggling around her. The worst nonsense was peddled by Anatoly Kalashnikov (born 1947) – who has collaborated with, and been all too influenced by, late Brusilovsky.

Just when I was wondering if the only illumination came from the entry hall’s spiralling metal chandelier (above) , which might have looked trendy in 1980s East Germany, I stumbled across a 2007 diptych by Lyubov Alexandrova entitled A Streetcar Named Desire, hung down a narrow side-alley on the gloomy landing leading to the museum offices (see below) . The hyper-realistic technique was worthy of Faibisovich’s best years; the work crackled with Hopperesque emotional tension; and the tram’s rain-splattered windows were captured with mind-numbing skill.

Alexandrova is one of the finest painters in Russia – the most technically gifted I have come across since meeting Vasily Drozdov in Khabarovsk in 2008. Yet Museum staff looked askance when I said the diptych was the best thing they had, and mumbled apologies when I asked them for information about the artist.

Cyrillic googling reveals that Alexandrovna attended art school in Ekaterinburg – but was born in 1958 in industrial Magnitogorsk, 300 miles to the south. In 2007 she won a prize in Khanty-Mansisk and in 2010 had a solo show in Harbin, China. In 2009 she qualified as an art teacher in Magnitogorsk. That’s about it.

The handful of her works accessible on the Net reveal a talent for portraiture and penchant for still-lifes in the Petrov-Vodkin mould – but her true genius resides in her ability to convey optical effects linked to glass and water. Streetcar , as far as I can see, remains her supreme achievement. I don’t expect many 21 st century works to better it.

The Museum held another surprise: a top-floor exhibition devoted to Ely Belyutin (1925-2012). His Arbat studio in Moscow was a primary post-war breeding-ground for the Non-Conformists, but he remains relatively little- known himself. The twenty works on show dated mainly from the 1940s – revealing Belyutin’s youthful obsession with Van Gogh – and from the late ’70s to early ’90s, with colourful abstractions of incidental appeal. As Belyutin was a pioneering abstractionist who paved the way for Masterkova in the late ’50s, it was a pity no abstract works from that period were represented. But you can’t have everything. An outlandish ‘Portrait of Polish Culture Minister Adam Wysocki’ (above left) , dated 1958, was abstract enough.

The Contemporary Museum also has a ground-floor commercial gallery , which is a good place for buying the psychedelic portraits of the city’s most famous son, Boris Yeltsin, churned out with groupie zeal by Nikolai Fyodoreyev (1943-96). There are still a few left (see right) .

Three other art galleries were taking part in the Biennial’s Parallel Programme .

The city’s swishest is Ural Vision (left) , established in December 2012 with the help of St Petersburg’s Marina Gisich, and already a presence at international fairs. Their Grand Ural exhibition (through December 5) includes Nikolai Grachikov’s abstractions; Denis Ichitovkin’s large, still- life-like interiors; and Maxim Kayotin’s subtle-toned quarries and rusting locomotives. The standard was high but something didn’t feel quite right. The owner wasn’t there, and her replacement showed no interest. The front desk was covered not with catalogues, but fashion magazines and real-estate brochures. The gallery’s downstairs neighbours? Ralph Lauren and Yves Delorme. The art felt a bit like an afterthought.

The shoestring-endowed Sweater Gallery – which opened in January 2014 and concentrates on Street Art – is in a different league. Its richly varied show called Let’s Meet in the Courtyard featured an heroic portrait of a pigeon; a washing-line draped with melting cars; entire walls – sometimes rooms – given over to single artists; a playground swing-frame transformed into eyes, nose, ears and lips; an installation of pyramid-shaded lamps; a pole-vaulting Banksy spoof; and a portrait of a boy made from broken bottles. The young, friendly staff were only too happy to tell you why to like it all.

The third venue, Pole Gallery (right) , is a poor relation. The (mainly Naïve) paintings in their show Running, Flying & Jumping were priced in the £200-800 range. Some were good and came cheap at those prices, but were cheapened by having to vie for attention with arty souvenirs and fluttering T-shirts.

After visiting the City Art Museum – despite Zabolotsky’s amusing 1850s Girl with a Fag (below right) , it is outshone by Perm’s, and scuppered by its hideous 1980s architecture – I was taken to Café Engels (sic) for a bilberry waffle (sic) by my guide Lara. ‘The best waffle in the world!’ she proclaimed hungrily. Good it was, and certainly preferable to the waffle in the Biennial catalogue – a fat 300-page paperback without a single image.

We moved on to the Local History Museum (above centre) , which was hosting a show entitled Art Revolution – From Picasso to Warhol consisting of ‘250 works by 15 of the 20 th century’s greatest artists.’ Now that’s real waffle. All 250 were either prints or reproductions.

There were two other shows on my Biennial programme. The first, called Cubade Russia , was an amateurish affair in a basement squat. The highlight was a photo cut-out of a tiny Fidel Castro emerging from a flowerpot (left) .

The second took place on the twisting banks of the River Iset, in the late 19 th century red-brick home of the Biennial organizers: the Ekaterinburg branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA). Katya Bochavar’s exhibition Factories – Direct Speech occupied five upstairs rooms, each filled with a different but equally inventive array of regional industrial products: metal plaques, pottery, rusting iron, bricks, metal bars.

The play of light and shadows created in a room hung with perforated iron sheets was scintillating. A five-tier structure of bricks and earthenware plaques, borne on a truncated wooden pyramid, looked simple – but the way it complemented the pipes, window-frames and neon strips in a room whose floor, walls and ceiling had been purpose-painted all-over grey was simply stunning (see below) .

Sadly, I had only about seven minutes to view the show, because our taxi meter was running and (as I was made abundantly aware) every second I wasted looking at art was bringing the NCCA closer to financial meltdown.

The NCCA seem to view foreign visitors as an unwholesome distraction, with the city sharing their indifference. To find the top two cultural highlights of Ekaterinburg – its Opera and Avant-Garde Museum – closed during the Ural Biennial was staggering.

My visit was made by possible not by the NCCA, but by the Vladimir Potanin Foundation – which has been supporting culture since 1999, and was sponsoring a symposium in Ekaterinburg on The Industrial Biennial as a Resource for Territory Development , staged under the auspices of the International Biennial Association. ‘What matters is that culture possesses a language understood by both business and the State’ thundered Foundation Director Oksana Oracheva. ‘Culture is often remembered when you speak about territory branding and positioning’ threw in Ural Biennial Commissioner Alisa Prudnikova.

Politicians, curators and foundation directors were among Symposium speakers, along with ‘representatives from the educational sphere and creative industries.’ Commissioner Backstein (below with friends) , needless to say, was present too. Artists, gallerists and art critics, needless to say, were not.

Artists need gallerists to earn a living, and gallerists need critics to promote their artists. Curators and Biennales are peripheral to this process, not – as they assume – central.

Biennales should not exist to help their organizers and ‘commissioners’ jump on an incestuous global merry-go-round, where Egos come first and Art is hijacked to fit into the spurious, pseudo-academic concepts of verbose ‘curators’ blinded to beauty and technique by their penchant for intellectual masturbation. This applies to Biennales the world over, but the Moscow and Ural Biennales also need to reflect their specifically Russian context: a country overflowing with artistic talent, and with a teaching set-up second to none, yet with a gallery-scene and collector-base that are Lilliputian. Russian artists have virtually no chance of earning a living by selling art in their own country. It is a doomsday scenario. Russia’s biennales gain nothing – other than expense they can ill afford – from hiring jet- set curators to dream up clever shows packed with foreign artists. Second-string Chinese artists have no place in the Ural Biennial. First-rate international artists like Almagul Menlibayeva have their place at the Garage or Artwin – not in the Moscow Biennale.

Russia’s biennales have a duty to bring as many Russian artists as possible to international attention. That means ditching the cosmopolitan central shows, slashing the VIP budget, ploughing whatever money is available into the satellite exhibitions, inviting as many foreign art critics as possible, and ensuring a couple of minibuses are available for the duration of the event so that visitors can travel from one far-flung venue to the next. What is the point of having dozens of shows and events if hardly anyone goes to them because of the physical and logistical difficulties involved?

And surely one of the first tasks of an ‘International Biennial Association’ is to encourage its members to speak to one another? The Moscow and Ural biennales should have co- ordinated their international communication and the dates of their openings (a ludicrous 13 days apart) so that foreign visitors could take in both events on a single trip – one also including the Cosmoscow contemporary art fair (which opened September 11).

Mind you, the Moscow and Ural biennales can’t even agree on what to call themselves. Moscow hosts a Biennale , Ekaterinburg a Biennial .

Hopefully hardy.

In all I visited 25 exhibitions and events that were part of the Moscow and Ekaterinburg biennales, and 25 more that weren’t. It was a hectic, exhausting and fascinating week.

The biennale programmes introduced me to the stand-out Svetlana Shuvayeva and to various artists of great promise (Viktoriya Malkova & Polina Moskvina, Katerina Poyedinschikova, Kirill Garshin, Leonid Tskhe). It was a pleasure to encounter outstanding works by established artists like Katya Bochavar, Shahzia Sikander, Mish- Mash, Sasha Ponomaryov and Dmitry Kawarga. Outside the biennales I discovered two world-class artists from an older generation: Lyubov Alexandrova and Boris Kocheyshvili.

Despite its amateurish main show, the Moscow Biennale was redeemed by three satellite events: Victory over the Sun , Nadezhda and No Time . The sheer audacity of packing art, however mundane, into 76 rooms of a Constructivist hotel, as headline event of the Ural Biennial, needed seeing to believe: I am glad I can say I Was There . But the big moments were elsewhere: in a peerless Street Art gallery, and in an abandoned printing-works hosting Russian drama at its dazzlingly crazy best.

The sumptuous City Art Museum, and a backstage tour of the Opera, were my highlights in Perm. But the abiding memory remains Rechnoy Vokzal, forgotten and forlorn: a monument to the difficulties facing all who strive to produce and promote contemporary art in contemporary Russia.