Exhibitions in GARAGE: March 2018

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Environnement d’Induction Chromatique Moscou, 2017, © Courtesy Cruz-Diez Art Foundation

Dear Friends,

Garage has made spring official in Moscow, opening three exhibitions of the new season. Amidst the numerous exhibitions, articles, and events remembering the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, the Museum is focusing on a long forgotten but significant event: the publication of The Crisis of Ugliness, by Soviet philosopher and art critic, Mikhail Lifshitz. At the time it was published the book caused quite a scandal, because of Lifshitz’s stance against modernism: afterall during the Thaw, it had stood for de-Stalinization and democracy. The problem is that it was precisely this link that Lifshitz contested—to him the idea that twentieth-century modernism was inherently democratic was simply a myth.
 
The second major show of the season, The Other Trans-Atlantic, may well have caused Lifshitz to begin another outcry, in that it presents forty-five artists from across Latin America and Eastern Europe who pioneered op and kinetic art from the 1950s to the 1970s: art forms which were directly influenced by the radical experiments of the avant-garde, both in their abstraction and in that they were fueled by utopian views. Developed in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the exhibition tells the story of a generation of artists that came of age in the aftermath of the Second World War, in regions that were undergoing rapid modernization, who held the conviction that art could shape society and transform our environment.
 
The third show of the season is the first in Russia by Andro Wekua, revealing the artist’s kaleidoscopic mind in an installation created specifically for the galleries that it inhabits. Dolphin in the Fountain resembles a frozen reality—like a children’s game of statues—where seemingly unrelated protagonists may have been transported to the installation from a computer game, or some kind of digital reality through a space-time anomaly. This is an art that resists any rational analysis or interpretation, while taking us into a landscape where memories, impressions, and emotions have the potential to create a new, autonomous life.

In other news, on April 10 Garage and BMW, who are partners for this year's Art&Science Grant program, will announce the winner of the 2017/2018 grant. He or she will receive a monthly stipend of 30,000 rubles to support an implementation of a project with the total budget not exceeding 750,000 rubles.

Lastly, do not miss the fast-approaching deadline for applications for our annual research program, Archive Summer, which is April 9.
 
For more information on what’s in Garage this month, please scroll down or stay tuned!

All the best,

Kate Fowle
Garage Chief Curator

 

GARAGE EXHIBITIONS

The Other Trans-Atlantic. Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s – 1970s exhibition at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2018, Photo: Alexey Narodizkiy, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

THE OTHER TRANS-ATLANTIC: KINETIC AND OP ART IN EASTERN EUROPE AND LATIN AMERICA 1950S–1970S
March 17–May 9, 2018

Presenting over forty artists and more than one hundred artworks from the postwar period to the end of the 1970s, this is the first major exhibition in Russia to survey a moment when the trajectories of the Central and Eastern European art scenes and their Latin American counterparts converged in the shared enthusiasm for kinetic and op art. The project challenges the mainstream status in art history acquired by postwar North Atlantic art production, and links the cultural centers of Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Bucharest, and Moscow with those of Buenos Aires, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo.

The exhibition showcases films, drawings, sculpture, paintings, and installations, plus includes a special ephemeral intervention in the Atrium by Carlos Cruz-Diez, as well as several works and reconstructions by Russian, Latvian, and Estonian artists. Organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in collaboration with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the show will then travel to SESC in São Paulo.
 
For more information on the exhibition and the accompanying public program, please visit our website.

 

Andro Wekua. Dolphin in the Fountain exhibition at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2018, Photo: Alexey Narodizkiy, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

ANDRO WEKUA. DOLPHIN IN THE FOUNTAIN
March 17–May 21, 2018

Andro Wekua's first solo exhibition in Russia features a new, site-specific project created for Garage. Working across sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, and bookmaking, the artist produces installations where elements coexist in a strange, and often unclear, relationship. “Things are held together with all this blurry material, which we cannot see or measure,” Wekua explains. “That’s interesting for me, how I approach these empty, in-between spaces.”
 
For Dolphin in the Fountain, Wekua has created an environment populated with seemingly unrelated protagonists: a series of paintings featuring a character the artist calls Wachtashka, an object symbolizing a house, and a giant wolf that either nudges forward or holds back a girl. Although the artist draws on his own histories, it proves pointless for the viewer to theorize about his Soviet childhood (Wekua was born in Sukhumi, Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1977), the mechanisms of memory, or the artist’s kaleidoscopic mind: it does not bring us any closer to the sensation of being in a Wekua landscape. The intermediate—the gaps and holes in the story—is what forms the landscape of Wekua’s works.

For more information on the exhibition and the accompanying public program, please visit our website.

 

If Our Soup Can Coud Speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties exhibition at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Moscow, 2018, Photo: Yuri Palmin, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

IF OUR SOUP CAN COULD SPEAK: MIKHAIL LIFSHITZ AND THE SOVIET SIXTIES
March 7–May 13, 2018

In the seminal year of 1968, the Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Mikhail Lifshitz (1905–1983) published a study of cubism and pop art called The Crisis of Ugliness. A uniquely detailed and illustrated source on modernist art, it was widely read across the Soviet Union. Very few actually agreed with its author’s views. The Soviet intelligentsia was abandoning Marxism en masse, but Lifshitz came out as its staunch defender in the aesthetic field. To him, modern art was “a system of devices for the creation of a moral alibi” for the cultural consumer. The only way forward, he reaffirmed, was realism, rooted in the classical tradition and driven by amateur creativity or “the artistic self-activity of the masses,” as it was called in the Soviet Union.
 
The exhibition If our soup can could speak… departs from Lifshitz’s seminal book. The result of a three-year Garage Field Research project, it takes a deep look at Lifshitz as a writer with a sense for uncanny contradictions and sublime historical ironies. In a series of rooms inspired by film sets, art historical interiors, and the settings of intellectual life in the Soviet Union, the exhibition delves deep into the Kafkaesque atmosphere of the Soviet epoch. It tells the story of Lifshitz’s notorious attack on modernism, revealing what is at the same time a declaration of love for art.

For more information on the exhibition and the accompanying public program, please visit our website.

 

GARAGE SCREEN

A scene from La Prisonnière. Director Henry-Georges Clouzot, France, Italy, 1968

FILM SCREENING: LA PRISONNIÈRE BY HENRY-GEORGES CLOUZOT WITHIN THE EXHIBITION THE OTHER TRANS-ATLANTIC
Date: Sunday, March 25, 2018
Time: 17:30–19:30
Venue: Garage Auditorium
Free admission, registration required

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1968 La Prisonnière (Woman in Chains) offers a nuanced view of the possible connotations that kinetic art might bring.

Developed with help from Denise René—a key figure in the op art circle, the film partly takes place in a gallery run by the protagonist Stanislas. He sells works by Nicolas Schöffer, Yacov Agam, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto, Victor Vasarely, and Max Bill. However, his flat, which is located in the back of the gallery, is full of the works of artists connected with a diametrically different kind of art: Jean Dubuffet and Hans Bellmer. These works relate to Stanislas’ other activity: taking nude pictures of hired models. The two types of artworks in the film show two different sides of his character.

Before the screening, Daniel Muzyczuk, head of the Modern Art Department at Museum Sztuki in Lodz, will introduce the film on Skype.

 

GARAGE FIELD RESEARCH

© Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

IN PROCESS: SAMMY BALOJI'S RESEARCH ON THE SOVIET INFLUENCE IN CONGO

Artist Sammy Baloji visited Moscow earlier this month on a research trip as part of the Field Research program at Garage. Between meetings with members of the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Science, the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive, and Andrei Sakharov’s archive, the artist has developed his future plans for the project.

Initiated by Sammy Baloji last year, the project explores the communist influence in the Congo, particularly looking into the transformation of the Belgian Congo into the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1964, Patrice Lumumba’s role in the country’s struggle for independence, and Joseph-Désiré Mobutu’s dictatorship during the years of the Cold War. 

Uniting the research already conducted by him outside of Russia—specifically at the Center of Archives of Communism in Belgium—where Baloji discovered the 1950s propaganda leaflets and posters distributed in Belgium and the Congo by youth groups with communist leanings, in Moscow the artist has examined Soviet propaganda films shot in the Congo after the USSR expanded its influence there by starting humanitarian aid programs to support the newly independent country. Baloji has also studied the history and development of the Moscow Institute for African Studies, the creation of which was proposed by American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois to Nikita Khrushchev, then head of the state, during Du Bois’s fourth visit to Soviet Russia.

Furthermore, this research in Russia and the artist’s visit to Andrei Sakharov’s archive as well as the museum of uranium ore samples connects to Sammy Baloji’s exploration of the ecological and sociopolitical issues that remain central to Congolese history—such as the exploitation of natural resources, especially copper and uranium, in order to produce weapons during the Cold War tension between the Soviet Union and United States.