US-Italian curator Francesco Bonami appointed artistic director of Moscow's GES-2 House of Culture
Bonami aims to “catalyse artistic energy” and “search for the best projects” for the institution, which is funded by billionaire Leonid Mikhelson’s V-A-C Foundation
Francesco Bonami, an Italian-born US citizen, has been appointed as the artistic director of the GES-2 House of Culture in Moscow. This comes amid deteriorating relations between Russia and Europe due to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The institution, established in 2021 by the V-A-C Foundation, opened with Teresa Iarocci Mavica as its head, but she stepped down a month after it opened.
Alisa Prudnikova, the founder of the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, has been overseeing programming at GES-2 since 2022 and will continue in this role until December, after which she will become an independent project curator. Bonami, who began his career as an artist, previously served as the editor of Flash Art magazine and as the artistic director of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
He has also been the co-curator for Manifesta 3 (2000) and the Whitney Biennial (2010). Bonami has been working with the V-A-C Foundation since 2010 and was a co-curator for Square and Space: From Malevich to GES-2 in 2024. He stated that Russia's sanctions are economic, not cultural, and criticized sanctioning culture as a "white crime that kills people's souls."
Despite the overall condemnation of Russia by Europe on cultural matters, Italy has been more open, with the Biennale's president defending Russia's participation. Bonami's appointment as artistic director aims to "catalyze artistic energy" and "search for the best projects," leveraging his experience to facilitate this.
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