Exhibitions in GARAGE: January-February 2019

CUT PIECE PERFORMANCE AT THE FINISSAGE OF THE FABRIC OF FELICITY EXHIBITION

Date: Sunday, January 27
Time: 19:00
Venue: Garage Atrium
No registration needed

On the last day of the exhibition The Fabric of Felicity, artist Anastasia Potemkina, who created the exhibition’s design, will recreate Cut Piece—a performance by Yoko Ono.

Performance art pioneer Yoko Ono was among the first artists to introduce instructions to her works. Event scores, popular with Fluxus and conceptualist artists, were close to Zen kōans in Ono’s works. Her 1964 performance Cut Piece invited audience members to come up on stage and cut off a piece of the artist’s clothes. Exploring the notion of personal space and aggression, Cut Piece was at the same time a form of protest against the War in Vietnam. Repeated many times in different cities, the "striptease show," as Ono sometimes referred to it, has become a classic of feminist art.

At Garage, the famous performance will be reinterpreted by artist Anastasia Potemkina and presented at the finissage of The Fabric of Felicity. Potemkina will be wearing a dress made of African cotton fabric featuring a bright Chintamani wax print. Chintamani, which in Sanskrit means "a diamond bringing fortune," emerged in Buddhist art. The pattern consists of three circles inscribed into a triangle, similar to Jacques Lacan’s diagram of human psyche, where three circles represent the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. In this fabric the metaphor of the "fabric of felicity" takes shape. The ornament is charged to bring fortune and contains the recipe of happiness—awareness of whatever happens on the three levels of the psyche. Every participant can take a piece of the wonderful fabric as a souvenir.

 

PUBLIC TALK: MARIA LIND AND MARIE-LOUISE EKMAN

On Thursday, January 24, the Swedish curator, writer and educator Maria Lind sat down with the artist Marie-Louise Ekman at Garage Auditorium to discuss Ekman’s artistic practice and strategy.
 
Images on garments usually reflect features that we want to help us stand out from the crowd, even if not for long: our sense of humor, our political views, our love for a particular mass culture phenomenon. In her limited series of shirts designed specifically for The Fabric of Felicity, the Swedish artist went further and drew an encyclopedia on a garment. The intended wearer identifies themselves with the world and humanity rather than with particular objects or images. This approach is characteristic for Ekman, who rethinks sexual and social roles using the language of comics. Danish researcher Lars Bang Larsen places Marie-Louise Ekman alongside contemporaries who “made the sign ‘woman’ a seemingly endless concept.” Ekman’s work affirms not so much the concept of universal equality as the inalienable right of all people to look ridiculous and to use an important tool for regulating mental health: self-deprecation.

 

GARAGE GRANTS

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS OPEN FOR THE ART AND TECHNOLOGY GRANT FOR EMERGING ARTISTS

Last December Garage announced a call for applications for the Art and Technology grant for emerging artists, awarded in partnership with BMW Group. The program supports artists and art groups aged from 18 to 35, working with information technology, engineering, and in the field of science art. Applications are accepted until March 10, 2019. Applicants are invited to apply by completing the form on Garage’s website and attaching a detailed description of the project, including a budget estimate. The project must be completed in no longer than twelve months. Award decisions will be based on the applicants’ uniqueness of vision, employment of new technologies, and cogency of artistic approach.
 
Along with a monthly award of 30,000 rubles, the winner will receive funding for the project they apply with. They will also be invited to visit the BMW Museum at the company’s headquarters in Munich and consult the company’s experts.
 
In 2017/2018 the grant was awarded to Moscow-based sound artist Sergey Kasich with the project Preservation of Silence.

 

GARAGE ARCHIVE AND LIBRARY

SINGLE COPY 2019 PARTICIPANTS ANNOUNCED

This year, аrtists Lyudmila Baronina, Haim Sokol, and Tatyana Faskhutdinova will produce unique artists' books as part of Garage’s project Single Copy. Launched by Garage Library in 2017, Single Copy is an annual project fostering the development of the artist’s book in Russia. Each year, the library commissions three Russian artists to produce unique works for its collection.
 
By March, each artist will produce a book that will become part of Garage Library’s collection. The books will be displayed at the library in special cases, and the artists will present their work to the public during Library Night in spring 2019.
 
Garage Library and Garage Archive already hold a collection of artists’ books produced by Russian contemporary artists including Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, Mukhomor Group, Viktor Pivovarov, and Dmitry Prigov. Allowing Garage to add new unique works to its collection, Single Copyalso helps draw public attention to the genre of the artists' book—and encourage young artists to explore the unique art form. The project also contributes to the rethinking of the library as an active participant and organizer of contemporary art events.

 

GARAGE PUBLISHING

THE BILINGUAL VOLUME TEMPORARY STRUCTURES IN GORKY PARK IS NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE AND IN GARAGE BOOKSHOP

The bilingual volume Temporary Structures in Gorky Park has been prepared based on the exhibition catalogue Temporary Structures in Gorky Park: From Melnikov to Ban published by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012 in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition. Based on this catalogue, Garage director Anton Belov proposed the continuation of the research into Gorky Park’s temporary structures and the completion of the publication with new material, including a chapter about the 2010s period. Thus, the new edition, expanded and revised, includes the chapters The Park in the Modernist Era and The Park in Recent Times, 2010s, as well as around a hundred previously unpublished unique reproductions of architectural graphics from the collection of Alexei Shchusev, acquired by Garage in 2018. This collection documents the architectural history of Gorky Park during the inaugural All-Union Agricultural Exhibition that took place on the site of Gorky Park in 1923. The volume’s last section features temporary buildings erected in Gorky Park during our time, focusing on Garage's two summer pavilions, Garage's temporary pavilion designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, Garage Screen summer cinema, and Nike Box MSK temporary pavilion.
 
Authors and editors of the book, architectural historians Sergey Koluzakov and Marianna Evstratova, have included around 300 illustrations, including the reproductions of works by Ivan Zholtovsky, Nikolai Lanceray, Ilya Golosov, Sergei Kozhin, Fyodor Shekhtel, Konstantin Melnikov, Sergei Ridman, Alexandra Exter, Vera Mukhina, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Aristarkh Lentulov, and others.

 

GARAGE SCREEN

THE WINNER OF GARAGE SCREEN SUMMER CINEMA PAVILION COMPETITION

Earlier this month Garage announced the winner of the design concept for Garage Screen Summer Cinema. SYNDICATE architects from Moscow will, in spring 2019, build a new summer pavilion in Garage Square in front of the Museum.
 
The competition, which began on October 17 and concluded on December 26, 2018, offered up-and-coming Russian architects the opportunity to tackle an ambitious task: they were asked to design a multifunctional temporary summer cinema pavilion that would be accessible to visitors with disabilities and meet the Museum’s standards of environmental responsibility. The competition was organized by Strelka KB.
 
The jury consisted of Dasha Zhukova, founder of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Anton Belov, Director of Garage; Varvara Melnikova, CEO of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design and founding partner at KB Strelka; Daria Paramonova, head of Strelka Architects; Ekaterina Golovatyuk, co-founder of GRACE studio and the architect behind the Museum’s first summer cinema; and Olga Aleksandrova, partner at BuroMoscow.
 
Dasha Zhukova: “One of the missions of Garage is to support Russian art and architecture. SYNDICATE offered something more than an architectural concept: it’s a new way of experiencing cinema. We hope that this competition will stimulate the development of temporary architecture in Russia.”
 
Anton Belov: “It was difficult for us to select a winner. All of the finalists are professionals and each of them produced a serious proposal for the summer cinema pavilion that was in line with our requirements. I am happy that the selection process wasn’t simple, as it shows that Russian architecture is on the up and up.”
 
Founded by a team of young architects with experience in major Russian and international firms, SYNDICATE (Moscow) creates buildings based on the principles of simplicity, availability of materials, and low maintenance.
 
The summer cinema design proposed by SYNDICATE is a truncated pyramid elevated off the ground, which allows for the cinema hall to visually unfold into the park, referencing the architecture of the former Vremena Goda café, which was reconstructed by Rem Koolhaas as a permanent home for Garage. With its bold shape, unusual materials, and functional design, the pavilion will be an architectural statement, and offer the experience of an open-air cinema in any weather, while its holographic facades, Garage Screen neon sign hung at eye level, and red velvet curtains will create a festive mood.

 

GARAGE SCREEN. PREVIEW

Date: February 5-10
Venue: Garage Atrium
Tickets are available online

In the run-up to the 2019 film season that will be launched at the new Summer Cinema in Garage Square in May, Garage Screen is showing a program of six festival premieres.

Garage Screen. Preview brings to viewers some of the key films of 2018 that have not been shown in Russia and are unlikely to get a wide release in the country. The program includes new works by acclaimed directors like Bruno Dumont and Ulrich Köhler as well as the most interesting debuts of the past year. The program includes A Faithful Man by Louis Garrel, The Load by Ognjen Glavonić, Have You Seen the Listers? by Eddie Martin, Genesis by Philippe Lesage, Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Coincoin et les Z'inhumains) by Bruno Dumont, and In my room by Ulrich Köhler.

 

CREDITS: Photo: Iaroslav Volovod, ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Sergey Kasich, SXEMA bureau, Filipp Sologub. Preservation of Silence (small), 2016, Installation view at the exhibition of projects from the short list of ZILART in the city, an open competition organized by ZILART Hall as part of the 2nd ARTMOSSFERA Biennial, Moscow, 2016, Courtesy of the artist; Vladislav Kruchinsky. Acknowledgements, 2018, Artist’s book, Watercolor and digital print on paper, Garage Library, Photo: Fedor Kandinsky; Photo: Fedor Kandinsky, ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; © SYNDICATE for Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Have You Seen the Listers?, Director: Eddie Martin, Australia, 2017. 86' 18+.