Moscow’s Biennale of Contemporary Art is a five week event, first started in 2005, with the great hope of reigniting the Russian contemporary arts scene and bringing new names, faces and ideas to the capital. Now in its fourth incarnation the Moscow Biennale (running September 23 - October 30) is now starting to hold its own in the international scene and is finally attracting the kind of attention it has longed for. With dozens of well-known political activists and controversial performance artists promising to attend, this year’s Biennale with its theme Rewriting Worlds, certainly has an anything can happen buzz to it.

 
The ArtPlay Design Centre

The main hub of activities will be the growing design centre ArtPlay which is based in a strikingly remodelled former tea factory. With former factories currently de-rigeur spots for artists, architects and graphic designers to congregate, the huge ArtPlay space has done very well over the past year to position itself as one of the most avant garde. French street artist C215 came by and left a huge portrait on the wall, the British Design School has a faculty there and its roofs and courtyards are regularly used for underground raves. All good news for the biggest Biennale programme yet, which promises to feature (at the last count) 64 artists and 14 artistic groups from 33 different countries, who will bring painting, sculpture, photography, video and sound art, performance art and computer assisted art to Moscow. 

 
Chinese political activist Ai Weiwei in Moscow

One of the strongest features of this year’s Biennale is its focus on activist art and dissident artists and the arrival in the city of names such as Ai Weiwei is guaranteed to stir much interest and possible controversy. Ai Weiwei, who was recently released from a Chinese prison where he had been detained on what the government claims were tax fraud charges, will show his film Second Ring. Based on footage the artist made of the traffic on Beijing’s second ring road, it is sure to strike a chord with those familiar with Moscow’s own traffic-clogged ring roads.

 
Festival of Activist Art

The first ever festival of ‘activist art’ taking place at the ArtPlay design centre from 24 September to 10 October will bring (providing they don’t get arrested beforehand) yet more artists involved in political and social activism to the Biennale.  US political pranksters The Yes Men and the Silence=Death Group are slated to get involved in the loosely organised festival alongside some 30 other (largely Russian) activist-artists. The Moscow faction of the controversial Voina group will also take part and are likely to gain as much interest from the art media as from the police. Currently fighting legal battles in St. Petersburg for audaciously tipping over police cars, Voina have gained the support of Britain’s Banksy and become famous for their outlandish and often shocking ‘performances’. Their most notorious gesture was in 2010 when they painted a giant phallus onto a St. Petersburg drawbridge which faced the local branch of the FSB (formerly the KGB). Their other actions have included staging a mock orgy in a biological museum, beaming a giant skull and cross bones onto a Moscow parliament building, throwing  cats at cashiers in McDonalds and filming as one of their crew stole a chicken from a supermarket by hiding it up where the sun don’t shine.

 
Dadaism, necrorealism, apartheid and 9/11

A Dada Festival will also take place at the ArtPlay Design Centre, with the participating artists looking to create a modern version of the anarchic artistic scene which began in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in the early 1920s. As well as Dadaist art exhibitions, lectures, discussions and performances will also be part of the programme. Over in Dasha Zhukova’s huge Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture a retrospective of the highly respected political South African artist William Kentridge will be held. Kentridge himself will visit the gallery on October 01 to deliver a performance of ‘I am not me, the horse is not mine’.

 

Elsewhere other hot exhibits to look out for include the AES+F group’s airport purgatory Allegoria Sacra, provocative photographs from Madrid’s underworld by Alberto Garcia Alix, Oleg Kulik’s dark thoughts on 9/11 and its aftermath and an examination of the grotesque Necrorealism movement that began in Leningrad in the late 1980s at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

The Fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art runs from 23 September to 30 October. A full schedule of events and participants can be found at 4th.moscowbiennale.ru