Mikhail Mindlin, the former director of Moscow’s National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), has been questioned by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in connection with a corruption investigation that has already landed a deputy culture minister in prison, the official Tass news agency reported. Although Mindlin was released after a few hours, the incident has shaken Moscow’s contemporary arts scene.
Immediately after he was removed from the NCAA, Mindlin was appointed director of the Central Andrei Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art. But on 31 May, as he returned from the Venice Architecture Biennale, he and the centre’s deputy head of financial affairs were brought in by the police for questioning in the case of Grigory Pirumov, who was arrested in March on charges of embezzling funds from state-sponsored cultural heritage restoration projects. Earlier that day, the FSB had also searched the NCCA building.
This follows culture minister Vladimir Medinsky’s decision earlier this month to merge the NCCA with Rosizo, the ministry’s exhibition arm. Both organisations are to run by Sergei Perov, a technocrat with military school training who favours Soviet-era art.
Perov is turning VDNH, a Stalin-era fairgrounds, into a showcase for Rosizo exhibitions. On Friday, 10 June, it is due to open with the Moscow version of the show Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, which ran at the Science Museum, London until March 2016.
In 2015, VDNH became the venue for the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. That event too is entering unchartered waters. On 31 May, Joseph Backstein, who has overseen the biennale as curator then commissar since it began in 2005, announced his resignation. “I can no longer work on the biennale,” he told Artguide.com. “A new format and structure are now being discussed.”