IZO: Veryu opening

Veryu (I Believe) is the preliminary salvo of the upcoming Moscow Biennale: a huge show curated in a few months by Oleg Kulik, who was the driving force of contemporary Russian art in the 90s. Veryu is sited in the main space of the VinZavod (Wine Factory) gallery complex, in great arched halls which remind many of the Venice Arsenale but which in their branching upstairs-downstairs configuration are probably better suited to the meandering, non-linear, recursive narratives of contemporary art. The Wednesday-night opening was billed as VIP-only, and the gleaming 4x4’s queued outside, but in the end all-comers were ushered into the frosty vastness. No food, a little mulled wine, bemused security wearing "I Believe" ID.

Dima Gutov, Dead Christ (after Mantegna), 2006

To my mind, the show is a success; it sets a benchmark for subsequent projects in the Biennale, which opens officially on 1 March. Taken as a whole, it is a convincing, sometimes exciting, national riff on the international "biennale look". Painting and photography, such as there is, is slung high on the walls as if to underscore its redundancy. Video installations and sprawling installations and 3-D works, many with a kinetic component, predominate. In contrast to, say, Venice, the impression is not of a slick selection but of something organic, chthonic: no bad thing. The lighting, which contractors had been struggling to complete, was minimally functional and at last night's opening a post-apocalyptic twilight hung over all. Many works have a phantasmagoric feel, as though they have emerged from a mushroom-cloud of marijuana. In this atmosphere of sweet Gotterdammerung, the art-groupies shuffled like zombies (or, in the terminology of Sergei Minaev's satire of modern Moscow, Dukhless, like "mummies"). Forewarned was forearmed perhaps: the only person recognisable from more than a few feet was critic Katya Degot in a dazzling snow-white scarf. Kulik himself exuded genial spirits from behind a beard that has come to resemble a force of nature.

Kulik's own contribution to the exhibition, a stove-warmed Mongolian yurta, is physically and socially at the heart of the show: a bright cosy refuge from the chilly caverns of art: one has to genuflect to enter. Identification of the authors of many of the works was difficult in the stygian atmosphere: labels were small or absent, and many artists, under pressure perhaps from their curator, had opted to produce non-typical pieces. Dima Gutov covered a wall with a fragment of Mantegna’s Dead Christ, the gigantic toes jostling visually with the heads of the viewers: one of several memento mori on view. Sergei Bratkov produced a ruined sculpture fronting a constellation of cases that puff steam. The Blue Noses created an endless drip of red wine. Dmitri Prigov covered a digger of juggernaut proprtions in black drapes and perched a goblet of blood-red liquid atop it. Valeri Koshlyakov mocked up a trolleybus-with-onion-dome in fabric, illuminated from within. Georgi Puzenkov excavated an apparent grave. Sergei Shekhovtsov and Semyon Faibisovich teamed up to create a Woman With Dogs. And so the list of project-inspired works goes on. A palpable hit with several people I spoke to was Konstantin Khudyakov’s video installation I Don’t Believe.

I was charmed by the view up a tennis-players’s skirt projected on the ceiling by Dmitri Bulnygin. But in the end my vote goes to Olga Chernysheva’s video installation Windows. On an unlit staircase we encounter multiple small video screens which display grainy long-lens views, shot at night through the windows of unsuspecting muscovites. This is explicit voyeurism, yet entirely sympathetic, humane and even humbling. I think it’s a masterpiece, and I bought one of the edition of 3.