Francesco Bonami Named Artistic Director of Russian Billionaire’s Moscow Art Complex

Francesco Bonami, a widely regarded curator whose achievements include curating the 2003 edition of the Venice Biennale, has been named artistic director of the GES-2 House of Culture, the Moscow art space sited across a river from the Kremlin.

Opened in 2021, not long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the 440,000-square-foot GES-2 House of Culture is run by the V-A-C Foundation, which was established by the Russian-Israeli billionaire collector Leonid Mikhelson. The owner of one of the largest natural gas providers in Russia not managed by the state, Mikhelson became one the first individuals to be sanctioned in the UK shortly after the war’s onset. He appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list between 2013 and 2021.

Even before the conflict began, the GES-2 House of Culture faced controversy. Teresa Iarocci Mavica, the museum’s cofounder, resigned at the end of 2021 for reasons that were unclear at the time. Some speculated that Mikhelson was personally unhappy with a monumental Urs Fischer sculpture sited outside the museum. Others drew attention to the fact that Mavica had personally toured Vladimir Putin around the cultural complex, whose official reasoning was that the V-A-C’s Venice space required greater attention ahead of the 2022 Biennale.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ragnar Kjartansson canceled performances of a new work staged at GES-2, saying, “It is not possible to have this work continue as this horror begins.”

Mavica, an Italian curator who gained Russian citizenship in 2019, was replaced by Alisa Prudnikova, the founder of the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art. Prudnikova will now step aside for Bonami to take up the mantle, though she will continue to do curatorial work for the museum.

Bonami, who was born in Italy and holds US citizenship, is well-known internationally. In 1993, he organized the Venice Biennale’s “Aperto” section for emerging artists; a decade later, he organized the art festival’s entire main exhibition. He previously served in high-ranking posts at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and has done editions of Manifesta, the Whitney Biennial, and the SITE Santa Fe International. (He previously wrote a column called “Ask a Curator” for ARTnews.)

He has previously done work for the V-A-C Foundation, organizing such shows as 2024’s “Square and Space: From Malevich to GES-2,” which he organized with Zelfira Tregulova, director of the Tretyakov Gallery.

Responding to the notion that Western curators should abstain from involvement in Russia’s art scene, Bonami told ARTnews in 2024, “Sorry, but the ethics of curating is a bullshit concept that I don’t indulge in. I could write a list of my colleagues who are collaborating with, to the say the least, ethically questionable people—but this is not the point … Sanctions are economic, not cultural. To sanction culture is a white crime that kills people’s souls.”

Of his future work for GES-2, Bonami said in a statement, “In my understanding, the role of Artistic Director is to catalyse artistic energy. Our common goal is to search for the best projects for GES-2. My experience should help with this.”