Ekaterina Degot

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  previews May 2012

  “Leonid Sokov: Point of View”

  Central to the development of Sots art—that movement begun in the early-1970s USSR, countering socialist realism with a pithy reframing of Pop art—Leonid Sokov has been exploring consumer ideology as a kind of folk art for more than forty years.

  Central to the development of Sots art—that movement begun in the early-1970s USSR, countering socialist realism with a pithy reframing of Pop art—Leonid Sokov has been exploring consumer ideology as a kind of folk art for more than forty years. For what will be the Russian artist’s first major retrospective, the Moscow MoMA has assembled a sweeping selection of some 120 pieces made between 1967 and 2011, including a cache of personal paintings direct from the artist’s studio. A comprehensive catalogue features contributions by Boris Groys, Julia Tulovsky,

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  print December 2011

  the 4th Moscow Biennial

  SOME BIENNIALS, such as those in São Paulo, Berlin, and Istanbul, have at least one permanent venue. This usually means the country in question gives contemporary art and the critical thinking that goes with it (or so we like to believe) some kind of legitimate status, regardless of whether the physical space allotted to it is an embarrassingly corporate exhibition hall, a traditional museum, or a former warehouse. Other biennials are constantly searching for a space, physical as well as intellectual. The sites such biennials come to occupy are often places where the wounds of change are most

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  previews September 2011

  4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

  The central exhibition in this biennial will span two venues—the gentrified industrial premises of the new ARTPLAY Design Center and the palatial galleries of the TsUM (supported by its namesake, one of Moscow’s poshest department stores).

  The central exhibition in this biennial will span two venues—the gentrified industrial premises of the new ARTPLAY Design Center and the palatial galleries of the TsUM (supported by its namesake, one of Moscow’s poshest department stores). According to curator Peter Weibel, the show’s title, “Rewriting Worlds,” twists Marx’s famous directive to not interpret the world but to change it: Weibel, for his part, is suggesting that it is precisely through a reinterpretation of the world that change happens. And with this biennial, featuring eighty artists—among them Kader Attia,

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  books March 2011

  Moscow Conceptualism

  History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism, by Boris Groys. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 224 pages. $28.

  The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes, by Matthew Jesse Jackson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 336 pages. $55.

  THE MOSCOW CONCEPTUAL CIRCLE is legendary today—but it could easily have been forgotten. Active in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s, this small community of artists, writers, and philosophers had no public to speak of, although it has retrospectively given contemporary Russia its most important, influential, and

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  print November 2010

  reports from Moscow

  IN MOSCOW, ideological struggles take place over cocktails. At one such soiree, I was approached by Olga Sviblova, the grande dame of the Moscow art establishment, curator of the city’s Photobiennale and director of its ambitious new Multimedia Art Museum, which hosts the art school where I teach. It was obvious she was appalled. “I was told you’ve been teaching students dangerous ideas,” she whispered. “One says you teach them Marxism!”

  By “you” she meant me and my colleague David Riff, and we have indeed been reading modern art history through the lens of Marxist notions. Our school is named