The most popular tourist destination in Russia is the Golden Ring. And this is understandable: ancient cities with their old churches and kremlins allow you to see what Russia as it really is, touch it, and understand it. But it has long been noticed that the potential of antiquity increases if a bit of modernity is added to the mix. Anyone who has visited Venice during the Venice Biennale knows how much sharper and more intellectual the experience is of this great Renaissance city’s beauty when it is contrasted with contemporary art.

St. Petersburg also appears different, bolder and more alive if one visits not only the Hermitage but also the Erarta Museum. By the way, the Hermitage itself focuses considerably on modern and relevant art: a department dedicated to its study was launched there in 2007.

Classical art by old masters remains, of course, unparalleled and attracts tourists’ maximum attention. The Louvre in Paris receives twice as many visitors as the Pompidou Centre, while the Hermitage, which ranks among the ten most visited museums in the world, draws four times more people than Erarta, the biggest private museum of contemporary art in our country, located across the Neva River from the Hermitage. Meanwhile, the most stunning effect of territorial transformation in global urban planning and tourism is associated precisely with contemporary art the so-called Bilbao Effect. This term derives from the construction of a radically designed building by Frank Gehry coinciding with the opening of a branch of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for contemporary art, transforming Bilbao, a city in northern Spain, into one of Europe’s major tourist centres. Such is the power of contemporary art. Places where it develops actively in Russia and where the essence of Russia manifests itself in new, sometimes unexpected dimensions are featured in our review.

Moscow artist Nikolay Polissky first arrived in the village of Nikola-Lenivets in the Kaluga Region back in 1989 and befriended local peasants. Soon after, they were ready to support all the nonsense born out of the author’s imagination. So, in the winter of 2000, an entire army of snowmen appeared in a field, followed two years later by the notorious and historically significant Aqueduct project, also sculpted out of snow, which made waves in the capital. The art collective created here by the artist began annually supplying the local area with bizarre ziggurats made of hay, towers, lighthouses, and gates crafted from broken trees and branches. These structures marked the beginning of a land-art object park, a subsequent supplier of which became the Arkhstoyaniye festival, conceived by Polissky together with architect Vasily Shchetinin in 2006. Since then, fully-fledged infrastructure, with eco-hotels, campsites, cafés, has emerged in this rural backwater, while the festival itself has become a major international event not only in the fields of art and architecture but also music. In 2025, it will take place from 25 to 27 July.

In addition to the beautifully restored Kremlin and reconstructed restaurant-museum street with 19th-century houses, the cluster is what makes Tula worth visiting. It takes its name from the eponymous Soviet factory, on whose territory it is located. Even today, workshops producing legendary microphones, beloved by Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Manson and Sting, operate nearby. One of the flagship locations within the cluster is the Machine Museum, a tribute to the factory’s glorious past and present. Artists and designers were invited to create an interactive space, ensuring that viewers of all ages would be captivated by iron artifacts that light up, move and even sing. The site also features a small café, lecture hall, bookstore and, most importantly, an impressive space for temporary contemporary art exhibitions, virtually the only venue of its kind in the city. Projects for these exhibitions are typically produced by Moscow curators, resulting in displays featuring both classics and young, emerging artists from across Russia.

The brutalist building was constructed in the mid-1980s in the centre for the last branch of the USSR’s Lenin Museum in Moscow. When the country was coming to an end, an exhibition was hastily put together and the museum opened its doors in 1987. Yet, by the early 1990s, both the headquarters in Moscow and all regional branches had closed. Unlike other regions, Krasnoyarsk quickly adapted and decided to repurpose the facility: several original halls were preserved as examples of late-Soviet modernist design, while the team and focus shifted toward contemporary art. As such, Ploshchad Mira can be considered one of Russia’s earliest museums in this field. Moreover, the museum staff’s contributions did not stop there: since 1995, they have hosted the Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale, the first large-scale survey of contemporary art in Russia. Additionally, they have amassed a collection of over 2,000 works by renowned artists, including Leonid Tishkov, Alena Kirtzova, Irina Korina and Dmitry Tsvetkov.

A former 19^th-century stable in the heart of Kazan now accommodates one of the most emblematic and active private cultural centres in Russia. Smena was launched in 2012 when a group of friends with diverse cultural interests decided to give themselves and the city a fresh impetus: “To make life more complex and richer, and experience more profoundly”, recalls co-founder Kirill Mayevsky. A modest gallery and small book fair laid the foundations for a variety of large-scale projects extending far beyond the centre. Among them are the Rudnik debut documentary film festival , their own publishing house, an interdisciplinary lecture series, an art residency programme with exhibition activities, and a major citywide book festival held in summer and winter in which Russian intellectual literature publishers participate. In addition to resident exhibitions, organizers bring exhibition projects from all over Russia and produce collaborative shows with invited curators.

The village of Ukurik in Zabaykalsky Territory is situated 150 kilometres west of Chita. Founded in 1930, it was surrounded until recently only by taiga steppe in the valley of the Khilok River. Everything changed four years ago when artist and sculptor Dashi Namdakov, who was born in this area, decided to “pay homage to the main place in his life”. During one visit, he recounts being approached by elders: “People are leaving here. We need to do something; this is where our gods and spirits reside!” Joining forces with friends, the artist devised the idea of creating an open-air art park. Within a year, working alongside residents of neighbouring villages, they built roads, developed infrastructure and populated the untouched landscape with enigmatic creatures from Buryat mythology, brought to life by Namdakov’s hands. A year later, the Tuzhi Art Summer Festival was launched, inviting other artists to contribute their work. Artists like Irina Korina, Alexander Povzner, Ivan Plyushch, Egor Plotnikov, Ivan Gorshkov and others have already left their mark on this place. This year, the multidisciplinary festival will take place in August for the third time.

“The location immediately resonated with all our ideas and became a new city for young creators”, says art cluster director Ksenia Artemyeva about Kapsel Bay in Crimea. It all started in 2015 with a youth conference on creative industries, after which the project team envisioned a larger, year-round space accommodating various cultural directions. Four years later, the picturesque seascape could be seen from newly constructed administrative buildings and art residency facilities. Today, the site boasts a fully functional art park with over thirty big installations and sculptures, hosts an annual festival, and operates the Meganom Academy. The Academy focuses on educational projects in music, design and new media taught by actors, musicians, artists, architects, theatre and museum directors, journalists and other professionals. This season, the Tavrida.ART Festival will run from 1 to 3 August and the expanded local infrastructure will accommodate not only participants but also tourists.

One of the world’s most famous Russian museums of contemporary art is experiencing a third lease of life in its 17-year history, each phase linked to the places where this nomadic institution has resided. It all began in 2008 at the start of the so-called Perm Cultural Revolution, when the local governor’s ambitions extended to this sphere. The historic exhibition of contemporary art called Russian Poor, held in the ruins of a former river station, marked the city’s entry onto the international art map and provided a powerful impetus for the formation of a new museum. PERMM spent several years in this same building awaiting renovation before relocating to a former shopping centre in a residential district in 2014, where it stayed until the end of 2023. Nonetheless, this period is associated with the museum’s roots in its community: numerous public art projects have been initiated, involving both local artists and residents in the institution’s activities. Celebrating its 15th anniversary in a newly adapted building tailored to the needs of the museum and its audience drew nearly the entire city. Today, the space accommodates both a permanent collection (considered to be among the best in Russia) and several temporary exhibitions.