It has been six years since the renovation of the former power station GES-2 was announced. The Russian billionaire Leonid Mikhelson had bought the listed building back in 2014; Mikhelson had established the art foundation V–A–C, named after his daughter Victoria, who studied art history abroad. The foundation needed a platform, and the disused power station was an ideal choice for an ambitious art space—being both a historical building facing the Moskva river, the Kremlin, and already part of a hipster district.

The long-awaited GES-2, rumoured to cost more than £300 million, was finally opened in December by Vladimir Putin, followed by crowds, big headlines, and numerous Instagram photos. ‘GES-2 is not a museum, it’s a city space,’ claimed the Italian art-manager Teresa Iarocci Mavica, co-founder of the V–A–C foundation. ‘We needed to find a new model for a cultural institution.’

The interior astounds the visitor. The space, renovated by Renzo Piano, is enormous and, also, generic with its sterile gallery walls, countless high-tech details, and open-work glass ceilings. The giant nave is split into three levels connected by galleries, overpasses, and lifts—the framework so functional that it feels more like a shopping mall than Cedric Price’s ‘Fun Palace’. The cross-sectional proportions try to be a basilica, but end up being something different. The rows of narrow galleries, framed with grill railings and overlooking the main exhibition space, suddenly resemble the prison layout, the kind where the guard can observe all the levels at once—the Panopticon effect. Or rather its modern counterpart, the Synopticon, in which ‘the many are watching the few’.

The main event of the season is seen from above. ‘Santa Barbara. How Not to Be Colonised?’ refers to the endless American soap opera from the eighties that was on-air in Russia from 1992–2002. The renowned Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson believes the soap opera played a major role in the cultural history of Russia and even formed post-Soviet people, being the first to introduce Western culture after the fall of the Iron Curtain. To illustrate that idea, Kjartansson came up with a durational performance which literally re-films about 100 episodes of Santa Barbara in Russian, an episode a day for three and a half months. There are actors, cameramen, props men, and cutters on the spot—some are busy acting and shooting, others are idly wandering amongst the public or staring at screens.

While the shooting-a-film atmosphere is kind of amusing, it is not clear why Kjartansson has Santa Barbara down as a cult for Russians, which it wasn’t, at least not for all. While older people were absorbed by its heated emotions, youngsters were swallowed up by something else—namely, video rooms, scattered across the whole country by the beginning of the nineties. Some people got their own VHS recorders, and collective viewings of rented films from the West were a new and exciting activity. For us, the videotape culture was the cult, not the soap opera. As a teenager, I remember Santa Barbara being embarrassing to watch. It’s rather embarrassing watching the re-filming too, as it can’t help but feel like a dubious colonialist gesture made by a Western artist using a billionaire’s money to heal the Russians from the trauma of the transitional period.

The theme of trauma and its healing constantly pops out within the Learning Programme—the educational add-on filled with lectures of various therapists, specialists in medicine, personal growth, and self-improvement. One part is called the School of Emotional Health. Another remarkable element is the ‘House of Culture’ rhetoric that surrounds the new institution. The V–A–C founders are highly inspired by this Soviet phenomena and intend to rethink it anew. But what exactly does the House of Culture stand for?

A new type of leisure facility built by the Soviet government, Houses of Culture (or ‘clubs’) were based on the already existing system of People’s Houses established in Imperial Russia to distract workers from drinking. Installed into the structure of the city, Houses of Culture allowed every district to have its own ‘cultural leisure’ place to meet—in the absence of drinking facilities, such as pubs in the UK. Many were built by the leading architects of the Soviet avant-garde—Konstantin Melnikov, the Vesnin brothers, Ilya Golosov, and others. By the 1990s clubs had been neglected or were turned into commercial spaces.

Aside from cinemas and concert or dance halls, every House of Culture had ‘kruzhki’. These were rooms for various hobby groups: choir and drama, arts and crafts, aero- and space modelling, athletics, chess, and many more. Groups were free of charge and open to all. It looks like GES-2 ideologists are nostalgic about that particular openness to the public, as well as the engagement, and there are some attempts to recover that.

The first attempt is a couple of tiny rooms packed with fancy handicraft materials for children to work with. Nice, but way too small-scale for the ambition. Another try is more substantial: an adjoining historical building has been transformed into the Art Production Centre—two floors of artists’ workshops filled with professional equipment, materials, and high-tech devices, such as 3D printers and large-format photo printing machines. This appealing initiative turns out to be a bit tricky, though. The potential artwork must go through an open-call judged on ‘quality and relevance of the project to the overall vision of GES-2’—whatever that means. Fifty to a hundred projects are accepted yearly, which is a sad number for a city of fifteen million. And the artists still have to pay for the materials.

So the question remains—can a capitalist House of Culture acquire socialist features? To be fair, there are a few things already present, such as free entrance, free mediation tours, as well as various public programmes.

On the other hand, the architecture won’t allow for the many group activities a House of Culture could deliver—the usable area is very small for a 20,000-square-metre building, because of the obsession with gigantism typical for a modern art venue. Galleries and passages may have created a space to wander, but this results in a massive lack of content. And the most important House of Culture function—collective creativity—is placed outside the main building. On the whole, GES-2 provides the public with a vast territory in which to chill out and stare, but it is yet to be engaged in actually doing something.

Having said that, there’s still the hope that it is possible to reprogram the space by bringing in more content and adjusting the ways of engagement—for the place to evolve, to become less sterile, less elitist, for it to give away more, and to enable more.