Exhibitions in GARAGE: February 2020

Dear Friends,

As the calendar cycle begins again, Garage steps into this winter with a spellbinding lineup of exhibitions and projects that offer a renewed and expanded understanding of how knowledge is inseparably connected to the senses, bodies and beliefs.

Art Experiment. You’re on Air and Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture, 1966–1985 have already opened the door to the phenomena that are hidden from view but are instrumental in preserving memory and knowledge: scents and archives. The former, via the olfactory realm, helped attune our perception of the invisible and the imaginary, while the latter, stemming from a research inquiry into Garage Archive Collection, showcases underground art of the Brezhnev era alongside the embodied knowledge of Soviet counterculture such as yoga, esotericism, and alternative medicine.

The first major show of the season, "We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams." The Other East and Esoteric Knowledge in Russian Art 1905–1969, is also fueled by research and will present a dreamscape of objects and ideas, tracing the fates of artists who were members of secret societies or constructed individual practices informed by their esoteric interests. Developed as a follow-up to the Garage Field Research project The Other East: Esotericism and Postcolonialism in Central Asia, the exhibition will bring together over 150 artworks, artifacts, and archive documents.

Inspired by a research trip to Russia, Exercises in Construction, Bending, is the new Atrium Commission, which is a sculpture by the Polish artist Monika Sosnowska. Literally gnarling Vladimir Shukhov’s hyperboloid tower, one of the paragons of modernity at the time, and cramming it into the Atrium, Sosnowska invites us to view the museum as a space where new forms of wonder and enchantment can take place.

Borrowing habits of looking and displaying from fashion, department stores, ethnographic museums, world expos and fairs, is Atelier E.B: Passer-by, another research-driven exhibition, which draws parallels between various modes of display where capitalist commodity and ethnographic object can similarly generate curiosity and even magical enjoyment. The exhibition has been previously shown at the Serpentine Galleries, London, and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, and was augmented for its Moscow iteration through the Garage Field Research called Travertina.

Lastly, early next month, taking a cue from paraknowledge, be it sensorial or esoteric, or para-institutions such as Atelier E.B, Garage will host a concert by Paraorchestrа, the world’s first large-scale integrated virtuoso ensemble of professional disabled and non-disabled musicians.

But there is always more to shake up our deeply ingrained convictions about the world! Feel free, as always, to join us starting from late January in a cycle of discussions Decolonizing the Mind.

For further information on what is at Garage this month, please scroll down.

Yours, 
Iaroslav Volovod
Curator
Anton

 

GARAGE EXHIBITIONS

POST-RELEASE. ART EXPERIMENT. YOU’RE ON AIR

Conceived together with artists, scientists, and perfumers from Russia, Europe, and the USA, the 10th Art Experiment entitled You’re on Air, explored the poetic, magical, and mnemonic properties of scents.

The project welcomed its first guests early this month and ran for 11 consecutive days, attracting over 2000 visitors. Each of them, together with us, set out on an exciting journey to the world of transparent and ephemeral matter.

Art Experiment. You’re on Air was also successful at creating jobs. Selected through personal interviews with 130 applicants, there were 55 art mediators hired and trained (the youngest being 15 years old, the oldest 32).

Complemented by a dreamy promo video and the public program that included talks by artists taking part in the project and invited experts in olfaction, the project helped visitors to enter deeper into the world of scents and essences.

 

GARAGE EDUCATION

“THE QUEER ELEMENT IN THE AESTHETICS OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITES OF SAMARKAND.” A TALK BY BORIS CHUKHOVICH

January 30
19:30–21:00

The talk will look at the group of Russian artists who worked in Samarkand in the 1920s, including Alexei Isupov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, and Daniil Stepanov among others. Boris Chukhovich will review the group’s aesthetic program and analyze the key themes and recurrent motifs in their work.

From 1920 to 1924, a group of artists gathered in the Samarkand garden of Daniil Stepanov, a painter who is barely remembered today. Apart from the garden’s owner, the group included Alexei Isupov, Aleksandr Nikolayev (Usto Mumin) and from 1923 Nikolay Mamontov and Viktor Ufimtsev. In 1921, they were joined for several months by Alexander Samokhvalov and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Although they never identified as a group and left no manifestoes, the similarities in their works allow us to speak of a common aesthetic ground that related the group to the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

 

PUBLIC TALK: LUCY MCKENZIE AND BECA LIPSCOMBE (ATELIER E.B)

January 31
19:30–21:00

In discussion with curators Oksana Polyakova and Daria Bobrenko, Atelier E.B will speak about the little-known protagonists of the exhibition Atelier E.B: Passer-by and explain how its stories are connected to the world of contemporary art and their own practice.

 

TOM EMERSON IN DISCUSSION WITH ANASTASIA MITYUSHINA

February 1
18:00–19:30

The public program for the new Atrium Commission Exercises in Construction, Bending includes a discussion of Monika Sosnowka’s practice by curator Anastasia Mityushina and ETH Zurich professor and architect Tom Emerson (6a architects) on February 1, 2020. Garage Library will present a selection of Sosnowska’s exhibition catalogues and information on the architects and movements that have informed her work.

 

GARAGE DIGITAL

GARAGE DIGITAL

Entitled New Research Practices, the launch grant program of Garage Digital will support five projects that study or demonstrate a change in the methods and subject of artistic research under the influence of algorithms, artificial intelligence, the Internet, big data, game mechanics and simulations, augmented and mixed reality, the latest production technologies, digital infrastructure and landscape.

Artists and creative groups with Russian citizenship are invited to send their applications. We accept projects that can be implemented as a website or in any other digital form that can be submitted online. Deadline for applications is February 3, 2020.

 

GARAGE ARCHIVE AND LIBRARY

 

NEW ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS IN RAAN

Archival collections of contemporary art from three Russian institutions—the Togliatti Museum of Art, the Perm Museum of Modern Art, and the Krasnodar Typography Center for Contemporary Art—became available on the website of the international research platform RAAN. All three institutions became participants in the Garage’s program to support regional institutions in 2019. During the year, employees of these organizations compiled a chronicle of artistic events and biographies of artists, which became the basis of the archival collections.

 

CONCERT: MOSCOW CONTEMPORARY MUSIC ENSEMBLE AT GARAGE LIBRARY

January 30
19:30–21:00

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble will present their second program for Quiet, Please—a series of quiet music events at Garage Library. Continuing the series of experimental music performances at the library, the concert will feature works by Russian and international composers that explore the phenomenon of silence.

 

CREDITS: Viktor Chernovolenko, Hermits, 1965, Courtesy Arendt family; Ariadna Arendt, Crimean Canyon, 1925 Courtesy Arendt family; Atelier E.B: Passer-by, installation view, Lafayette, Anticipations, Paris, 2019, Photo: Pierre Antoine; Monika Sosnowska’s installation Exercises in Construction, Bending in production, 2019, Photo: Ivan Erofeev © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture, 1966–1985, installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2019, Photo: Yuri Palmin © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Photo: Boris Chukhovich; Atelier