Despite these high-profile events, one had to look hard to find reflections of these in the Biennial. British curator Nadim Samman selected the main programme, – 'Deep Inside', at the vast former textile factory Tryokhgornaya Manufaktura from an open call to artists under the age of 35. One might view the age restriction as an attempt to eschew big-draw names and to give younger artists the chance to work at a larger scale or,  more cynically perhaps,  simply to save money,  given the lack of public funding, even for a renowned event like the Moscow Biennial. The assembled line-up of 87 artists' works housed in claustrophobic anterooms, labyrinthine corridors, and an ambitious mirror-clad room broadly emphasised the diminishing space between the handmade, the virtual and the artificial.

..Other notable works include Russian artist Yulia Spiridonova's Parallel News, 2016, which combined two news feeds: Moscow State University´s daily radio programme of garden question time and a state news source. The resultant work comprised black-and-white images of plant life and weeds alongside handwritten Cyrillic scrawls – joltingly punctuated by the repetition of #Brexit – offering a much-needed touchstone with the outside world.

– Chris McCormack,  Art Monthly,  September 2016

'Parallel News' was commissioned for the Moscow Biennale of Young Art 2016 Main Project – 'Deep Inside'.

During the fall of 2015, I worked at a news agency where I received hundreds of newsletters and press releases every single day. Amid the intense stream of updates about city traffic, exhibition openings, and government hearings, I was particularly drawn to the news about the Botanical Garden of Moscow University, known as the Apothecary Garden. This feed featured a different kind of story: how cats ate too many valerian flowers, how an 80-year-old palm tree was rescued from an accident, and how exotic cacti blossomed out of season, among others.

Any moment of life is interpreted in the context of various events happening around it. The construction of history itself depends greatly on what we choose to emphasize, or what the media emphasizes for us.

During the Biennale, I took pictures daily of the plants featured in the Apothecary Garden news feed. I made prints and delivered them to the exhibition by noon. I also took notes of the major news from Russia and the world, recontextualizing them with notes from my personal diary.

These three different streams of messages serve as a multiplier of contexts in which an event can be interpreted and perhaps become a symbol of the very process of constructing text and reality.