The founder of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Joseph Backstein, has died

In London, art critic and cultural critic Joseph Backstein, who founded the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, died after a long illness. He was 78 years old. The Moscow Biennale announced this.

“He is known all over the world as a curator and art critic: Joseph Backstein was one of those who turned the first ten years of the 21st century in Moscow into a fireworks display of world contemporary art,” said representatives of the Biennale in Telegram channel.

The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art is an international exhibition held in Moscow since 2005 in odd-numbered years. The theme of the first biennale was “Dialectics of Hope”. A thinker associated with the topic was political scientist Boris Kagarlitsky (in 2022, recognized by the Ministry of Justice as a foreign agent, in 2023, included in the list of terrorists and extremists). The 2011 Biennale featured 81 artists from 33 countries. Within the framework of the exhibition, work was also underway on 64 special projects, including in London and Kyiv. In 2021, the ninth biennale was not held due to the coronavirus pandemic, and in 2022 it was banned from showing three days before the official opening. The reason for the closure was the “inconsistency of the exhibits with the site.”

Joseph Backstein was born in Moscow in 1945. He was educated in the field of heavy engineering and worked in various research institutes during the Soviet years. Then, as a curator, he began to organize exhibitions of informal art in Moscow: the Avant-Garde Club and foreign exhibitions of Russian conceptualists.

Since 1991, Backstein headed the Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1992 he founded the Joseph Backstein Institute of Contemporary Art. He worked as a leading researcher at the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies. In 2005, he became the curator of the first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. He was commissioner of the Moscow Biennale until May 2016.

Joseph Backstein organized exhibitions of Moscow conceptualists in the Butyrka prison in 1992, “New Trends in Necrorealism” by Evgeny Yufit in 1994, the Eastern European art fair Art Hamburg, the exhibition of “Russian Actionism” in New York, the Russian exposition at the European Biennale of Contemporary Art MANIFESTA 4 and the Venice Biennale. In 2008 he prepared a retrospective of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

Anastasia Larina