How to Gather: Acting Relations, Mapping Positions

<p>We never dreamt we would create the biennial as it occurred. Nor did we imagine we would be publishing this book two years later. The 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, as an exhibition, was never fully ours, just as this book is not fully ours either. We are merely a node in a network that feels the urgency for proper public reflection. A similar kind of urgency led us to devote our best efforts to an almost defunct biennial, which resulted in an exhibition of remarkable vitality created under exceptional circumstances.</p> <p>This publication is the outcome of a shared feeling among the biennial’s producers and participants that it had been successful on one of the most important levels a cultural project can hope to achieve: in generating a collective sense of capacity, meaning, and camaraderie. Over ten days — a brief period for an international survey of contemporary art — the biennial re-oriented the public platform of VDNKh’s Central Pavilion, the former Soviet exhibition venue for Achievements of the National Economy, toward the question of how to gather. It was a question that functioned both as the engine and the outcome of the engagement we embarked upon in Moscow under highly volatile conditions in which the relations between the two poles of Europe — the European Union and Russia — and, more locally, between the biennial and the city partners, were rapidly deteriorating…</p>