Moscow's GES-2 House of Culture has appointed Francesco Bonami, an Italian curator who also holds US citizenship, as its artistic director. The institution, which opened in 2021 inside an early-20th-century power station opposite the Kremlin under billionaire Leonid Mikhelson's V-A-C Foundation, announced the move this week.

The timing is pointed. Russia's official relations with Europe are at a low over the war in Ukraine, and museum exchanges with EU countries and the UK were suspended after the 2022 invasion. While Europe has largely condemned Russia on the cultural stage, Italy has been a relative outlier. The decision to hand the flagship venue to an American citizen drew commentary in Moscow: one cultural commentator asked whether it was not interesting, in 2026, that GES-2's artistic director would be an American, albeit of Italian ethnicity.

Bonami is a heavyweight hire. He began as an artist, edited Flash Art, directed the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, co-curated Manifesta 3 and the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and spent nearly a decade as a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2024 he curated Maurizio Cattelan's first gallery solo show in two decades at Gagosian New York. He has worked with the V-A-C Foundation since 2010, and in 2024 co-curated its show tracing the role of Russian art in 20th-century innovation.

The politics around the venue are impossible to ignore. Mikhelson has been personally sanctioned by the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ukraine since the invasion, though not by the EU or the US; ownership of GES-2 was transferred to his daughter Victoria in 2023. Bonami told the press release his job is to catalyse artistic energy and find the best projects, while the GES-2 team said the appointment reflects its commitment to dialogue and exchange with artists and cultural practitioners from any country open to engagement.