Exhibitions in GARAGE: June 2019

ALLORA & CALZADILLA’S NEW INSTALLATION GRAFT OPENS ON GARAGE SQUARE

May 26–December 1, 2019

Late last month the Puerto-Rico-based duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla presented their first major solo project in Russia as part of the Garage Square Commission series. Visitors to Gorky Park and the Museum now have the unique opportunity to witness the phantom blooming of Roble Amarillo trees (Tabebuia chrysantha), a common native species in the Caribbean. Recreating the delicate yellow flowers of these tropical trees, thousands of artificial blossoms will remain scattered across Garage Square throughout the summer and winter as an enduring reminder of the increasingly rapid disappearance of the planet’s biodiversity.
 
Allora & Calzadilla’s installation resonates with the themes examined in The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100, an exhibition exploring important issues around environmentalism and ecology, which will take place at Garage from June 28 to December 1, 2019.

 

THE COMING WORLD: ECOLOGY AS THE NEW POLITICS 2030–2100

June 28–December 1, 2019

Soon a major exhibition project, The Coming World, will occupy the entire Museum building, bringing together historical and new works by over 50 Russian and international artists. The exhibition takes a look at a future already in the making, when the environmental agenda will become one of the main political questions. The suggested timeline references two widely speculative points in time taken from the sphere of popular science and iconic science fiction: 2030 is suggested as the year when existing resources of oil will be exhausted (Paul R. Ehrlich, Beyond the Limit, 2002), putting an end to the Oil Age; and 2100 denotes the year that, according predictions made by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1960s, human life will be able to expand to other star systems. The exhibition alludes to a compressed period of time starting from the not too distant future, when the human race will be forced to live with the final knowledge that “there is no planet B,” through to a future imagined in the past, in which humans were expected to progress sufficiently to be able to settle on other planets.

Participating artists: Kim Abeles, Doug Aitken, John Akomfrah, Allora & Calzadilla, Maurizio Cattelan, Le Corbusier, Critical Art Ensemble, Driessens & Verstappen, Karel Dujardin, Max Ernst, James Ferraro, gruppe finger, Bill Fontana, Hayden Fowler, Gints Gabrāns, Gnezdo (Nest) group, Hans Haacke, Huang Yong Ping, Mella Jaarsma, Helge Jordheim, Sergei Kishchenko, Lawrence Lek, Mikhail Matyushin, Eadweard Muybridge, Numen/For Use group, Alexander Obrazumov, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Patricia Piccinini, Sascha Pohflepp, Anastasia Potemkina, Laure Prouvost, Jon Rafman, Rimini Protokoll, Pamela Rosenkranz, Martha Rosler, Boryana Rossa and Oleg Mavromatti,Salomon van Ruysdael,Tita Salina, Tomás Saraceno, Gerry Schum, Susan Schuppli, Allan Sekula, Denis Sinyakov, Victor Skersis, Studio Drift, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Elin Már Øyen Vister, Ben Woodard, Wooloo, Tori Wrånes

 

GARAGE GRANTS

THE INSTALLATION HOW TO MEET AN ANGEL BY ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV IS NOW ON VIEW AT GARAGE

June 6–October 31, 2019

How to Meet an Angel, an installation by the conceptual artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov that has been built outside the Museum, opened to the public last week. This large-scale installation inscribed into the landscape of the park consists of an intricate ladder supported by several structures and rising into the sky. On the ladder a modestly dressed figure is visible, with hands extended toward the sky in the hope of meeting an angel. The figure may be waiting in vain, but as the audience will learn from the performative part of the project—created specifically for the show at Garage—the encounter is possible. This romantic scene presents a theme that is recurrent in the duo’s work: a small human creature trying to break away from their frail and predictable world. The installation also addresses another element that can be found in many of the Kabakovs’ works: the idea of flying, of which two polar incarnations can be found in the images of a fly—that most trivial creature from the reality of Soviet communal living—and an angel, a pure celestial being representing an unattainable, mystical world.

 

POST-RELEASE. RASHEED ARAEEN’S 1970 PERFORMANCE DISCO SAILING IN GORKY PARK

The world premiere of the British-Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen’s 1970 performance Disco Sailing took place on Pionersky Pond in Gorky Park on Saturday May 25, 2019. The never-before-seen avant-garde dance on water concluded Araeen’s first major retrospective exhibition at Garage, which spanned his career from Karachi-era drawings to recent paintings and sculpture. The exhibition first opened at the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) and travelled to MAMCO (Geneva), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), and Garage on a tour that spanned eighteen months. The Moscow iteration of the exhibition attracted around 60,000 visitors.

 

GARAGE SCREEN

GARAGE SCREEN SUMMER CINEMA LAUNCHES IN A NEW PAVILION

On May 29, Garage Screen summer cinema reopened in a new pavilion, with a program including recent festival hits and film classics ranging from genre cinema to avant-garde and experimental pictures. For the second year running, Garage Screen summer cinema is presented in partnership with Farfetch, an online platform that supports cultural initiatives across the world. The new pavilion, designed by Moscow architecture firm SYNDICATE as a result of a nationwide competition, opened with the Russian premiere of Simona Kostova’s Thirty, one of the biggest debuts of 2019. Screened at festivals in Rotterdam and Berlin, the film is shot in real time and immerses the viewer in the life of today’s thirty-year-olds. An additional screening of the film will take place on June 19.

 

GARAGE PUBLISHING

RASHEED ARAEEN’S FIRST COLLECTION OF ESSAYS IN RUSSIAN

Journey of an Idea is a selection of essays by the British-Pakistani artist, curator, and writer Rasheed Araeen, published in Russian for the first time. His long struggle for justice—employing artistic methods focused on geometric abstraction and political means such as essays, performances, and exhibition projects exposing racism—made him an authority in the world of art. Araeen’s articles are reflections on Western art’s interconnection with colonial egoism, and descriptions of utopian art projects intended to be available to all viewers, regardless of skin color or place of birth. The book was published to mark the exhibition Rasheed Araeen. A Retrospective ( March 8– May 26, 2019). The preface by exhibition curators Valentin Diaconov and Iaroslav Volovod includes a parallel reading of Araeen’s texts alongside treatises by the artists of the Russian avant-garde.

 

VIKTOR PIVOVAROV. THE AGENT IN LOVE

New from Garage Publishing is an English translation of Viktor Pivovarov’s cult book The Agent in Love, the first in the new series Artists Write, which aims to make key texts by Russian artists available to a wider audience.
 
The Agent in Love is more than an autobiography. In telling the story of his life in Moscow and Prague and his renewed relationship with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, artist Viktor Pivovarov plunges the reader into the rich cultural life of the artistic underground which existed behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s and 1970s. First published in Russian in 2001, and then by Garage in 2016 in an expanded edition, The Agent in Love has now been translated to English by Andrew Bromfield.

 

CREDITS: Allora & Calzadilla, Graft, 2019, Installation view, Garage Square, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Photo: Ivan Erofeev, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Dan Perjovschi, Drawing for the exhibition The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100, 2018, Courtesy of the artist; Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s How to Meet an Angel, Moscow, 2019, Photo: Ivan Erofeev, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Photo: Dmitry Shumov, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Photo: Ivan Erofeev, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art