Organizers and observers attribute Manifesta 10’s ability to function relatively freely to the patronage of the influential Mr. Piotrovski, who said he wanted to bring the biennial to St. Petersburg because his city had fallen behind Moscow in its contemporary art offerings.

“You can’t use art for political purposes,” said Mr. Piotrovski, whose museum celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. “This is a sacred territory. It has its own rules.”

Another exhibit, “Apartment Art as Domestic Resistance,” a series of readings and performances held in a former Soviet-style communal apartment, was less sanguine about the inviolability of art. Olesya Turkina, the Russian curator of the exhibit, said the city’s independent artistic life took place mainly in kitchens after it was driven underground by the Soviet regime.

That Russia could see a return to this kind of cultural repression was one concern of the participants. “Whether Manifesta is here or not, it is really important for us to include our view and our voices in the public space, because this possibility could end,” said Pavel Arsenev, a poet and activist based in St. Petersburg. Mr. Arsenev, 28, came up with the popular antigovernment slogan “You don’t even represent us,” which in Russian also means, “You cannot even imagine us.”

Last month, as part of Manifesta, Mr. Arsenev organized a day of “poetic actions” in the city. On a Saturday morning, young volunteers wearing sandwich boards handed out poems by Bertolt Brecht at metro stations (“The way things are, won’t stay that way,” read one placard; “Who is responsible for the fact that oppression still exists?” read another). Later, in the shadow of the Peter and Paul Fortress — once home to an infamous political prison — Kirill Medvedev, a poet, singer and literary critic, read aloud from the poetry of political prisoners.

Waiting out a brief hailstorm on Arts Square, Anton Kuryshev said he had traveled from Moscow to attend the poetic actions. He was looking forward to hearing a speech originally delivered at the first congress of Soviet writers in 1934. “Now the situation is more like the ’30s maybe,” he said.

Sergei Medvedev, a professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said it was only natural that artists were staging performances in response to current events in Russia. “In the conditions of severely limited political freedom, when the opposition and the free press have been almost entirely eliminated, contemporary art has to step in,” Mr. Medvedev wrote in an email.