Curated by Peter Weibel

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, Bernadette Corpora- tion, Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich, Susan Hiller, Isaac Julien, Neo Rauch, and, tentatively, Ai Weiwei—from twenty countries, Moscow is allowing in a wider world than ever before. There will also be numerous related special projects, mostly by local curators, spreading beyond Russia’s capital to Yekaterinburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, and select interna- tional sites, too.

— Ekaterina Degot