VAC leaves the palace – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Dmitry Butkevich talks about what events the Foundation for the Development of Modern Culture carried out in the city and about its future fate.

“Goodbye, Venice! Your Angel shines brightly…,” wrote Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1891. Probably everyone who has visited Serenissima (“The Most Serene” is how Venice is unofficially called) remembers the city with love and sadness. I want to go back there, at least for me. I don’t know if it will happen.

So the VAC Foundation for the Development of Contemporary Culture, founded back in 2009 by one of the richest people in Russia, Leonid Mikhelson, together with the inspiration and long-term curator of all his artistic endeavors, Teresa Mavica, left Venice. Now it’s official.

I remember that in the mid-2010s, the foundation held art events as part of a parallel program of the Venice Biennale in a rented palazzo on the island of Giudecca. Then he bought Palazzo Della Zattere on the opposite side of the canal, right on the Embankment of the Incurable (remember the famous essay by Joseph Brodsky?), where he opened his own exhibition and cultural space in 2017.

Again, I remember the presentation of the foundation during one of the biennales with a grandiose street performance right on the embankment and even in the water of the canal, with the participation of circus performers and a small excavator. Those who are familiar with the monstrous Venetian bureaucracy understand the effort it took to organize this event.

The exhibitions were, to say the least, traditional for the foundation in general and for the current GES-2. By the way, the entire area of ​​the Venetian building occupies 2 thousand square meters. m, half is given over to exhibitions. There is a restaurant and even residential premises.

Teresa Mavica resigned as CEO of the VAC Foundation at the end of December 2021, three weeks after the opening of the GES-2 space. The Venetian palazzo was occupied for some time, as the Western press wrote, by Ukrainian refugees. From the beginning of 2024, Mavika also left the post of general director of Palazzo Della Zattere, and the space there itself, as the GES website reports, “will be taken over by another cultural institution.”

Merezhkovsky again: