Exhibitions in GARAGE: an exciting program ahead in 2019

Dear Friends,

As our 10th anniversary year comes to an end, I would like to thank everyone who helped us to make it such a momentous year, from regular visitors to those who had their first experience of Garage in 2018, whether in person or via social media. And, of course, GARAGE cardholders and Patrons, who continue to provide invaluable support to the development of the Museum. I am also grateful to all of the artists, curators, collectors, gallerists, writers, critics, and historians who worked with us these years.

In 2018, around 900,000 people visited Garage. That’s an average of 2,500 visitors per day! Over the year we hosted 17 exhibitions, over 3,000 educational events, 730 tours, 406 film screenings, 2 professional conferences, 9 building-wide performances, and 5 dance-filled Mosaic Music concerts. The third Garage Art Book Fair attracted 12,000 visitors over three days. More than 2,500 people took part in workshops and projects organized by our Inclusive Programs Department, which has made Garage a regional leader in the field of museum accessibility.

Garage Archive Collection expanded greatly in 2018, acquiring more than ten archives, including those of Alexei Shchusev (1873–1949), one of the most important architects in pre-Revolutionary and Soviet Russia, artist and historian Andrei Khlobystin, art historian and curator Andrei Erofeev, and artist Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe (1969–2013). Through its Russian Art Archive Network, Garage is making more of the archive collection available in digital form. Garage Library continued to grow, adding over 4,000 new titles. We welcome new Library members (it’s free to join!).

There’s an exciting program ahead in 2019, with solo exhibitions by Pavel Pepperstein and Rasheed Araeen and a major group show called The Coming World, on the theme of ecology and the future. But the first event in the new year is Art Experiment, our traditional participatory project, which aims to get children and adults involved in making art during the New Year holidays. This year The Miracle of Light celebrates the 180th birthday of photography and you can learn various ways of creating images, including how to make and use a pinhole camera.

Thank you for being with us in our 10th anniversary year. On behalf of all the staff at Garage, I wish you a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2019.

With best wishes,

Anton Belov

 

WINTER

2019 will begin with the ninth iteration of the museum's Art Experiment series, which is titled The Miracle of Light, and celebrates the 180th anniversary of the invention of photography. It’s a quest through the Museum that teaches techniques for creating images using light such as camera obscura, pinhole cameras, photograms, cyanotypes, and freeze light photography. The year will continue with an exhibition by Russian artist, writer, musician, and art theorist Pavel Pepperstein. Introduced to the circle of Moscow Conceptualists as a child, Pepperstein has been one of the most prolific mythmakers in Russian contemporary art throughout his career. He is an inventor of systems, universes, languages, cities, and political projects. Pepperstein’s solo exhibition at Garage reviews the key myths he has created since the 1970s: from imaginary countries for which he has developed detailed maps and national symbols to visions of the future that range from the ecstatic to the ultra-logical; from religions, cults, beliefs, and rituals to alternate realities that exist in parallel dimensions and modalities. The exhibition will feature approximately eighty works spanning the artist’s career from both public and private collections, as well as material from Pepperstein’s personal archive and Garage Archive Collection.

 

 

SPRING

The spring will see the Museum host a landmark retrospective of Rasheed Araeen. Araeen (b.1935) trained as an engineer in Pakistan before moving to the UK, where he began his artistic career in 1964. This first comprehensive survey of his work will span six decades, revealing the scope of Araeen’s expanded artistic practice, from his early experiments in painting in Karachi and his groundbreaking Minimalist sculptures in London, both of which predate American Minimalism, to his key political pieces from the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972 he joined the Black Panthers, and has been a prominent promoter of postcolonial voices within the former British Empire. The show will also feature his editorial and curatorial projects, and a selection of his new geometric paintings and wall structures, which have brought him recent acclaim at Documenta and the Venice Biennale. Araeen will also develop an Atrium Commission specifically for Garage, producing for the first time a sculpture he envisaged in 1968. The sculpture will pay tribute to the avant-gardist Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, which was planned for St. Petersburg in 1917 as a Socialist answer to the Eiffel Tower but never erected in full scale.

Next March will also see Bureau des transmissions, which was developed jointly by the Museum’s curatorial and educational teams, and focuses on the production and circulation of knowledge in a museum setting. Highlighting the Museum’s converging function as a research facility, an art incubator, and a pedagogical experiment, it will include both Russian and international participants such as Karoline H. Larsen, microsillons, Katya Muromtseva, Kirill Savchenkov, Anna Tereshkina, Linda Vigdorčika, Olga Zhitlina and others.

 

 

SUMMER

In the summer the Puerto Rico-based duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla will present their first major solo project in Russia with a Garage Square Commission, just outside the Museum in Gorky Park. Allora & Calzadilla’s Commission ties in with a show that will run around the same time, The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100, the first exhibition of its kind in Russia to explore important iss/emues around environmentalism and ecology through the language of visual arts, science, technology, and activism. The exhibition’s title alludes to a time period in the future when, certain authors have theorized, the planet’s oil and water resources have been depleted, but humanity has yet to colonize other planets. In this speculative era, the human race would be forced to live with the knowledge that we are stuck on a dying Earth with no planet B. Thus the show points to a future that is already in the making, when the environmental agenda becomes the main political question. The Coming World will bring together existing works and new commissions from more than fifty artists and visionaries. It will open with Purple, an immersive six-channel video installation by John Akomfrah and include a new Garage Atrium Commission by Huang Yong Ping. The Museum's 2019 Garage Live program will present a series of events specially conceived for The Coming World.

And Garage has much more to announce in 2019. Stay tuned to our website to catch the first news about the expansion of our Archive Summer Program, which invites researchers from around the world to work in its Archive Collection of contemporary Russian art history. Expect announcements of the seventh international conference, which will explore the cultural and institutional landscape of the space once known as post-Soviet, news about inclusive programming on the migrant experience in museums, and the launch of a new studio and residency program—Garage Studios.

 

 

CREDITS: Photo: Ivan Erofeev, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Pavel Pepperstein, World Map,2018, Oil on canvas, Courtesy of the artist; Pavel Pepperstein Blossoming Flag, 2018, Oil on canvas, Courtesy of the artist; Rasheed Araeen, Opus F3, 2014, Acrylic on сanvas, 160 × 160 cm, Courtesy of the artist; Rasheed Araeen, Nine, 1967, Painted steel, 61 x 61 x 61 cm, Courtesy of the artist; Karoline H. Larsen, Collective Strings, 2017, Installation view, Trapholt Museum, Kolding, Denmark, Photo: Dorthe Alstrup; Doug Aitken, The Garden, 2017, Photo: Anders Sune Berg, Courtesy of the artist and ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Allora & Calzadilla, Under Discussion, 2005, Single-channel color video with sound, 6’ 14”, © Allora & Calzadilla; John Akomfrah, Still frame from Purple, 2017, © Smoking Dogs Film, Courtesy Lisson Gallery