Art attack mocks missiles of Soviet war machine

Published on Saturday 6 June 2009 19:53

BY NIGHT, the disarmed intercontinental ballistic missiles arrayed outside the old Motovilikha factory museum evoke a Cold War graveyard.

But the art curators from Moscow who have embraced this military-industrial city see the setting differently: as a quirky backdrop for modern dance.

In a region once known best for producing rockets, petrochemicals and salt – and for incarcerating dissidents in Gulag prison camps – Perm is banking on contemporary art, architecture and theatre to overcome its weighty past.

"Doing modern dance performances against the background of these rockets is very appropriate," said Nikolai Palazhchenko, a founder of Winzavod, a trendy Moscow arts centre, and now one of the cultural trendsetters working on projects in Perm.

The city is still a disjointed melange of Soviet industry, the remains of stately pre-revolutionary mansions and tilted wooden houses scattered along the Kama River. But Palazhchenko and his associates think Perm could become Russia's Berlin. The Russian media are already calling it "Bilbao on the Kama," a reference to the down-at-the heel Basque city transformed by a Guggenheim Museum there designed by Frank Gehry.

Perm's old Motovilikha factory seems a particular fascination. After some of Russia's best young playwrights gathered in Perm for the Novaya Drama contemporary drama festival in March, their workshops resulted in Motovilikha Worker, a play based on interviews with factory workers.

Another landmark – the city's former Stalin-era riverboat station – was reborn in March as the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art. Until recently, the region's most internationally famous museum was Perm-36, a former Soviet prison camp exhibited as a warning to society.

Perm has struggled since communism's fall, with factories like Motovilikha hit hard. But Sergei Gordeev, a wealthy senator and patron of Soviet Modernist architecture, has been a driving force behind Perm's current cultural ambitions. He and other philanthropists have committed to giving a total of about 1.5 million a year toward the new contemporary art museum's collection.

"I love it!" wrote Oleg Chirkunov, the region's governor, after visiting Russkoye Bednoye, an exhibition curated by Marat Guelman, Moscow's most prominent and controversial art gallery owner, at the riverboat station last year. "I think that Perm has the chance to have a world-class museum."

Although isolated during Soviet times, Perm, a city of about one million people some 700 miles east of Moscow, has a rich cultural tradition. The Stroganoff family was given control of the region by Ivan the Terrible and promoted the arts. The Kirov Ballet and Opera were evacuated here from Leningrad during the Second World War.

Sergei Diaghilev, creator of the Ballets Russes, grew up in Perm, and a festival named after him began in 2003. An opera of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, about the gulag, had its world premiere at the festival last month.

Now Chirkunov says Perm needs a new, post-Soviet identity, "a place where it is comfortable for people to live, where there is some concentration of intellectual people," he said.

"Russkoye Bednoye," or "Russian Poor," an exhibition at the contemporary art museum of found-object installations by some of Russia's most acclaimed contemporary artists, has become a catchphrase for the financial crisis. Cultural magazine Bolshoi Gorod called it one of 2008's definitive new phrases. Another Moscow magazine, Afisha, named Perm "City of the Year."

But some Perm residents are less than thrilled about its newfound cachet. Communist activist Aleksei Bessonov mirrors the criticisms of some Russian nationalists and religious leaders who say contemporary art is often pornographic and reflects a pseudo-liberal philosophy that is ruining the country.

"They want to appear as liberals in the West, as intellectuals," he said of those promoting it. "In fact," he added, "they are fascists, simply fascists. What they are doing is cultural fascism." While the city celebrates art, Bessonov says, the region is mired in poverty.