Exhibitions in GARAGE: March-April 2019

GARAGE

RASHEED ARAEEN. HOMAGE TO TATLIN, 1968/2019

RASHEED ARAEEN. HOMAGE TO TATLIN, 1968/2019

In the fifty years since Rasheed Araeen made the first small-scale model of Homage to Tatlin in 1968, his practice has undergone many transformations, the artist having been involved in the making of numerous important exhibitions and publications.
 
Araeen was familiar with the tower thanks to Camilla Gray’s seminal 1962 book on the Russian avant-garde, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922. He quickly responded to the egalitarian potential of the structure with his Homage to Tatlin (1968), which until the exhibition at Garage existed only as a project for a large sculpture.
 
Today, the 7.5-meter sculpture Homage to Tatlin embodies Araeen’s very personal vision of the formal and political ambitions of the Russian avant-garde. Working within a broad cultural context, Araeen sees the avant-garde, along with minimalism and Islamic interlocking patterns, as episodes in the “journey of an idea,” in which geometry was used to produce a situation of equality between the artwork, the viewer, and the artist (and in the future, perhaps, a situation of political equality).
 
The 400-meter tower designed by Tatlin was to contain four large geometric structures, each with a particular function. A cube at the bottom was intended for large meetings and conferences; a pyramid above it would house the administration of Comintern; then followed a cylinder containing an information center with printing presses and a telegraph; and a hemisphere, whose function is today unknown but which according to some sources may have been designed to hold radio equipment.
 
In Araeen’s work the tower is distilled into pure movement or, in the words of the constructivist artist Vladimir Stenberg, into an “engineering truth.” What it offers is not freedom of interpretation but freedom from interpretation: the experience of its color, rhythm, and movement is equally accessible to everyone, regardless of gender, race or age.

 

PUBLIC PROGRAM FOR RASHEED ARAEEN. A RETROSPECTIVE

PUBLIC PROGRAM FOR RASHEED ARAEEN. A RETROSPECTIVE

Covering minimalism, postcolonialism and the search of identity by non-European artists working in the Western culture, the public program for Rasheed AraeenA Retrospective offers an opportunity to get a better understanding of Araeen’s art and the socio-cultural situation he has criticized in his work. The program of lectures, workshops, reading groups, and performances explores the social and cultural contexts that have informed his work, and their evolution in time. A series of lectures will be devoted to a detailed analysis of Araeen’s minimalism and his critique of the political foundations of Western modernism. Speakers invited to take part in talks and discussions on the crisis of colonialism and the search for new identities by migrant artists and authors include one of the key figures in postcolonial studies, Gayatri Spivak.
 
On March 23 and 24 in a workshop on the theory and practice of minimalism in music developed in collaboration with Playtronica, participants will look into the phenomenon of synesthesia, and in particular sensory experiences evoked by color perception—and compose their own musical pieces.
 
Starting March 22 co-curators of the exhibition Valentin Diaconov and Iaroslav Volovod will lead a reading group focused on the issues explored in Third Text, a journal published by Rasheed Araeen.
 
In May, Gorky Park visitors will have an opportunity to see Disco Sailing, a performance conceived in 1968, in which nine performers will balance on minimalist circles designed by Araeen and floating in Pionersky Pond.

 

PUBLIC PROGRAM FOR BUREAU DES TRANSMISSIONS

POST-RELEASE. STAGE PERFORMANCE OF THE SHORT STORY “ADAR”

POST-RELEASE. STAGE PERFORMANCE OF THE SHORT STORY “ADAR”

Last Thursday, March 21 in Garage LAB within the space of the Bureau des transmissions project, the stage performance of Olga Jitlina’s short story “Adar” took place. The piece is structured like a never happening dialogue between two persons from different parts of the world, who feel equally excluded. Rather than addressing freedom, equality, and brotherhood as political categories, the text describes them as forms of sensory experience in the first instance.
 
The short story is based on a real-life event—the death of the Gambian refugee Pateh Sabally in Venice’s Grand Canal after Pateh was denied renewal of his temporary residence permit in Italy. The audio performance Fraternité, loosely based on the story, was staged in October 2017 as part of the Research Pavilion project during the Venice Biennale.
 
The inaugural stage dramatization has been prepared by the text’s author Olga Jitlina together with Vladislava Milovskaya, Ignat Khlobystin, and Daniel Oppong.

 

Saturday, March 23
18:00–19:30

1597 SECONDS: A GAME INVENTED BY ARSENY ZHILYAEV AND ASYA VOLODINA
Garage LAB

Thursday, March 28
18:00–20:00

TELL ME A STORY. A LECTURE BY POLINA SINEVA
Garage LAB

April 3–May 15
varies

FIREWORKS AND GUNPOWDER: A BOARD GAME INVENTED BY KIRILL SAVCHENKOV
Garage LAB

Friday, April 5 and Saturday, April 6
19:30–21:00; 15:00–17:00

AN ARTIST-TALK AND A WORKSHOP WITH LERA LERNER ABOUT NON-INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE
Garage LAB

Friday, April 19
19:30–21:00

BETA VERSION OF “THE” MUSEUM: PUBLIC TALK BY THE LAAGENCIA BUREAU OF ARTISTIC PROJECTS
Garage LAB

LEARN MORE

 

GARAGE SCREEN

INTERNATIONAL CALL FOR ENTRIES: GARAGE ANNOUNCES A SPECIAL PRIZE THE COMING WORLD FOR EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILMS

INTERNATIONAL CALL FOR ENTRIES: GARAGE ANNOUNCES A SPECIAL PRIZE THE COMING WORLD FOR EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILMS

In June this year, Garage Screen launches its new season of screenings part of which will be the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival (July 10–14, 2019). Last year, Garage became the strategic partner of the festival and has developed a special prize within the framework of the exhibition The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030-2100 to be held at Garage from June 28 to December 1, 2019.
 
The Coming World exhibition will bring together existing works and new commissions from over fifty artists and visionaries. It is the first and largest exhibition of its kind in Russia to explore important issues around environmentalism and ecology through the language of visual arts, science, technology, and activism.
 
The title alludes to a time period in the future when, as 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 will be forced to live with the knowledge that it is stuck on a dying Earth with no planet B. The Coming World points to a future already in the making, when the environmental agenda will be the main political question.
 
The Coming World Prize of  $1,000 will be awarded to a visual artist or filmmaker whose short film reflects in the most urgent and experimental way the understanding of ecology in an expanded field is raised within the exhibition. The winner will be chosen by an international jury and announced on July 14, 2019.
 
In order to apply, please visit http://en.mieff.com/submissions

 

GARAGE FIELD RESEARCH

SASCHA POHFLEPP. POST-RATIONAL NATURE

SASCHA POHFLEPP. POST-RATIONAL NATURE

Artist and design researcher Sascha Pohflepp aims to critically explore different notions of evolution in the past, present, and speculative future. Today, we may be entering a new era in the history of evolution, one where advanced biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) may lead to an unexpected and rapid rise in diversity of artificially generated organisms.
 
The starting point for his Field Research project became the State Darwin Museum in Moscow, one of the first European museums devoted to evolutionary theory. During his research trip in February, Pohflepp thoroughly explored various materials from the museum archive. Extensive visits to the museum funds and permanent exhibition as well as meetings with the museum curators helped the artist in his attempt to uncover a particular history of views on phenogenesis (the differentiation of forms of life’s forms) including the theories not only of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, but also of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the social reformer Rudolf Steiner, which formed the core of the original concept of the Darwin museum envisioned by its founder Alexander Kots.  
 
Developed in the framework of the exhibition The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100, Sascha Pohflepp's research will take the form of an imaginary extension to the State Darwin Museum. The newly founded institution focuses on new species created by anthropogenic technological means such as the combination of synthetic biology/genetic engineering with neural networks as main sources for the imagination. The State Darwin Museum’s collection shall serve as a training set for the dual process of recognition and generation of new creatures performed by the AI that will be specially developed for the exhibition project.

 

GARAGE ARCHIVE AND LIBRARY

DROJJI CONCERT AT GARAGE LIBRARY

DROJJI CONCERT AT GARAGE LIBRARY

Date: April 12
Time: 19:30–21:00
Place: Garage Library
Free admission, advance registration required (80 seats)

Moscow electronic duo Drojji will take to the stage at Garage Library as part of the quiet music concert program Quiet, Please!

Drojji is a duo of musicians and sound artists Feliks Mikensky and Andrey Guryanov who perform electronics live with elements of plunderphonics, footwork, free improvisation, and many other genres. For their concert at Garage, Drojji are working on a special quiet program where they will revisit lyrical songs of the 1960s and 1970s, using this music material for discovering parallels with some extreme electronics via the common romantic spirit they share. In the musicians’ own words, “Drojji is an exploration of neurotic energy, its relationship with the excessive information flow breaking beyond any limits, as well as the relatively recent possibility of and, perhaps, necessity in having several simultaneous information flows”.

About the participants: Born in Moscow in 2017, the Drojji duo has since performed at Moscow venues, including New Space Theater of Nations, Winzavod Moscow Contemporary Art Center, and GROUND Gallery. Their tracks have been included in various independent compilations released by Russian and foreign labels.

 

 

CREDITS: Tatlin and assistant in front of the model of the Monument to the Third International in the Studio for Material, Space, and Construction (the former mosaic studio of the Academy of Fine Arts), Petrograd, 1920; Rasheed Araeen. A Retrospective, installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2019, Photo: Alexey Narodizkiy, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Rasheed Araeen during his artist’s talk at Garage on March 8, 2019, Photo: Anton Donikov ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Photo album from the history of Darwin Museum, 1950s, Author unknown, Courtesy The State Darwin Museum archive; Drojji. Photo: Sergey Aloff. 

 

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