For Russian Followers of Contemporary Art, Best Part of the Exhibit Might Be the Venue

MOSCOW -- A video tribute by British artist Pam Skelton to the Soviet-era poet Anna Akhmatova is difficult to see. The images are washed out by blinding light from white exposed brick in the cavernous hall where the exhibit is housed.

But the hall itself, part of a newly renovated 19th-century factory, is eye-catching. From the white-haired woman in the guardhouse, who opens the door with an oversize key, to the nearby black-box theater that was once a factory club for workers, it is redolent with life and memories.

A boom in contemporary art and an international showcase called the Second Moscow Biennale have inspired exhibits all over the city. But often, the spaces the art inhabits -- evocative remnants of Moscow's early industrial age -- steal the show.

For the first time, the vast brick complexes that brought steam-age production and affluence to Russia more than a century ago are being renovated, reused and even declared historically protected. This is completely new in a city where restoration typically means a fake facade and the gutting of a vintage building.

Vinzavod, a 172,000-square-foot, 19th-century wine factory, has been brought back from near death, as has its neighbor, the Arma factory, whose huge gas cylinders once lit the Kremlin.

Project Fabrika, or Project Factory, where Skelton's work is located, is particularly startling because one-third of the plant is still a functioning production site for technical paper.

Elsewhere in the complex, a dance collective called TSEH, which means workshop, has run the flexible performance space known as a black-box theater since last fall. "It was a big issue to have our own space, to have our own home," said director Elena Tupyseva. "Now we perform two times a month." Art films and experimental music are also shown at the venue.

The success of some of these projects and a general rise in interest here in the postindustrial aesthetic have spurred plans to convert bigger factories that are in even greater disrepair. So far, the city and state have not contributed any money, according to artists and architects. Instead, the private funds of Moscow moguls are driving the change.

Some of Russia's best-known art dealers have shuttered their galleries in central Moscow and moved to more affordable factory space in Vinzavod to take part in the Biennale. Two of Moscow's first post-Soviet dealers, Aidan Salakhova and Marat Guelman, were among the first tenants.

"Everybody is moving here because it is cheaper," said Alexander Brodsky, the chief architect overseeing the project. "And I hope that it will become a place with a real artistic life. We spent two years on this project, and our blood is on the floor."

Brodsky is best known in the United States for his Canal Street Subway Project, in which he transformed unused parts of a New York City station into a faux Venetian canal. He has kept the wine factory building largely intact, leaving a fantastic underground space of exposed terra cotta and white brick.

Sixty Russian artists have filled the underground rooms and tunnels of Vinzavod with a strange, humorous and at times mystical exhibit called "I Believe." The program is curated by Russian artist Oleg Kulik, who is perhaps best known for his stint as a dog in the mid-1990s. Naked except for a studded collar, he growled and played in a cage at New York's Dietch Projects gallery when he wasn't being walked by his wife.