Exhibitions in GARAGE: September 2016

Robert Longo, Untitled (Cosmonaut Tereshkova, First Woman in Space), 2015 (detail), Сharcoal on mounted paper, 2 panels, Overall dimensions 107 x 69 x 46 inches (271.8 x 175.3 x 116.8 cm), Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London • Paris • Salzburg

Dear Friends,

It’s installation time here at Garage as we prepare for the launch of our fall program, with four new projects opening at the end of the month. Giving a nod to the importance of learning from art history and a providing an international perspective on the social, cultural, and political urgencies of our time, this season features an exhibition developed by Robert Longo titled Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo, alongside the first retrospective of the Slovenian collective Neue Slowenische Kunst—NSK: FROM KAPITAL TO CAPITAL.

Meanwhile, Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen has created the third iteration of Garage Atrium Commission series, and Moscow conceptualist Boris Matrosov has developed the first commission to appear on the Museum roof.

Spanning centuries and geographies, revealing the ways artists respond to the complexities of the times they live and work through, we hope you will get the chance to experience fall at Garage first hand!

Scroll down for more on what's in store this month at Garage.

All the best,

Kate Fowle
Garage Chief Curator

GARAGE EXHIBITIONS

Film still of Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, 1944-1945, Courtesy of Gosfilmofond (National Film Foundation of Russian Federation)

PROOF: FRANCISCO GOYA, SERGEI EISENSTEIN, ROBERT LONGO

30 September, 2016 – 5 February, 2017

Featuring works by Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and Robert Longo (1953-) Proof offers insight into the singularity of vision through which artists can reflect social, cultural, and political complexities of their times. Curated by Garage chief curator, Kate Fowle, in collaboration with Robert Longo, the exhibition has been developed through extensive conversations, arising out the decades-long influence of Eisenstein and Goya on Longo. This inspired two research trips to Russia, during which the artist spent time in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, the Pushkin Museum, and the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia (formerly the Museum of the Revolution) in Moscow, and the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Consulting with a number of specialists, Longo discovered drawings by Eisenstein that have never been exhibited before, met with the world’s leading Eisenstein specialist, Naum Kleiman, to learn about the filmmaker’s interest in Goya, and uncovered little-known connections between Goya and Russia that go back to the 1917 Russian Revolution. As a result of this research, the exhibition includes forty-three of Eisenstein’s sketches from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts that will be presented alongside seven of his films—projected in slow motion, so that each frame can be experienced as independent images. Forty-nine of Goya’s aquatint etchings, from all four of his suites, have been loaned for the first time from the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia and more than thirty-five works by Longo, produced in the last fifteen years, loaned from international collections.

Neue Slowenische Kunst Emblem, 1984, Designed by New Collectivism

NSK: FROM KAPITAL TO CAPITAL

30 September, 2016 – 5 February, 2017

Garage presents the first survey show in Russia of the Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), developed by the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana.

The collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) was founded in 1984 by three groups—the multimedia group Laibach (formed 1980), the visual arts group IRWIN (formed 1983) and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater (1983-1987). In the same year, the three groups founded a fourth group, the design department New Collectivism. Later, NSK established other departments: the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy (1986), Retrovision (1987), Film (1984), and Builders (1985).

The exhibition NSK: FROM KAPITAL TO CAPITAL is placed within the economic and sociopolitical context of the turbulent decade of the 1980s. As a unique, self–organized alliance formed in response to its time, NSK gave an artistic proposal for a different ideological system and a new type of institution, developing its own principles of organization, economy, and terminology for the collective’s artistic practices. The proposal they put forward challenges the simplistic binary opposition of socialist versus capitalist ideology, marking NSK as a global cultural phenomenon transcending its specific time and space.

NSK: FROM KAPITAL TO CAPITAL is curated by Zdenka Badovinac, Director of Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, and organized by Snejana Krasteva, Garage Curator.

GARAGE ATRIUM COMMISSIONS

Sketch of the installation, Yin Xuizhen, Slow Release, 2016, Courtesy of the artist

YIN XIUZHEN. SLOW RELEASE

30 September, 2016 – 31 January, 2017

Over the summer, Muscovites have been donating their red and white clothing, contributing to the making of Yin Xiuzhen’s site-specific magnified medicine capsule. Entitled Slow Release, the twelve-meter long installation references a new generation of pills designed to reduce the speed of release of medicine in the body in order to increase its therapeutic effect. In Yin’s installation, however, the role of the decelerating element is played not by the capsule, but by the outside layer of clothing which envelops the structure.

By allowing visitors to enter the capsule, which is covered in the kind of clothes we wear every day—our second skin, as the artist refers to them—Yin creates a situation where people can slow down and experience the effect of being inside their own body.

The work functions as a powerful reminder of the antidote individual human experiences can provide to the overwhelming societal drive towards progress.

GARAGE SQUARE COMMISSIONS

Installation view of Boris Matrosov, No, She Couldn’t Have Known How It Would All…, 2016, Courtesy of the artist,
© Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

BORIS MATROSOV: NO, SHE COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN HOW IT WOULD ALL…

September 18, 2016 – March 5, 2017

A new project as part of Garage Square Commissions, No, She Couldn’t Have Known How It Would All… by Boris Matrosov is the first to take advantage of Garage rooftop.

Matrosov was a member of World Champions (with Giya Abramishvili, Konstantin Latyshev, and Andrei Yakhnin), a group which was active in Moscow in the late 1980s. World Champions were known for mocking the seriousness of the practices of the older generation of Moscow Conceptualists such as Andrei Monastyrsky and Collective Actions. They received critical acclaim for absurdist actions such as Strokes of Joy(where they worked collectively to create a drawing of random objects on a large sheet of paper attached to a wall) and The Gray Sea (in which Abramishvili brought a bottle of water from the White Sea and Zvezdochotov from the Black Sea, and the group mixed the water in a little pool, announcing the discovery of a new, “gray” sea).

Matrosov’s new text object, “No, she couldn’t have known how it would all…” sounds like a fragment of an overheard conversation. Mounted on the roof of the Museum building, this unfinished sentence invites many questions. Who is she and what would actually happen? Presented as a large neon sign, this phrase, which seems to belong in a conversation between friends, confuses our ideas of the private and the public, of the nature of questions and answers, and the essence of art.

Through this project the concept of Garage Square Commissions is also expanded—the space of Garage Square, where artworks have previously been located, becomes the viewing place for visitors taking in Matrosov’s neon message.

GARAGE INCLUSIVE PROGRAMS

Experiencing the Museum seminar, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, September, 2016, Egor Slizyak,
© Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

ANNUAL TRAINING FOR MUSEUM WORKERS EXPERIENCING THE MUSEUM: DEAF VISITORS

Date: September 20–21, 2016
Time: 10:00–20:00
Venue: Garage Education Center
Free admission, registration required

On September 20-21 Garage hosted Experiencing the Museum, its annual training for museum professionals. This year it was dedicated to museum accessibility for hearing-impaired and deaf visitors. The first day provided insight into how the deaf community perceive information, methods of communication, and different concepts of disability. Participants also explored case studies from successful programs at English, American and Dutch museums, presented by international colleagues. The day concluded with Garage’s presentation of the first contemporary art dictionary in Russian Sign Language (RSL), developed in collaboration with RSL native speakers. The second day had a more hands-on approach, concentrating on the practicalities of working with hearing impaired visitors, ensuring each participant was equipped with a set of basic tools to develop programs for deaf and hearing-impaired audiences a Russia.

GARAGE PUBLIC PROGRAMS

JAZZ FESTIVAL: SOUND. LIGHT. SHAPE

Date: September 16–25, 2016
Venue: Garage Atrium
Free admission to lectures, registration required
Please visit our website for the concert schedule and to purchase tickets

This fall, from September 16 to 25, Garage explores its building’s past and invites visitors to Sound. Light. Shape, a festival celebrating what would have been John Coltrane’s 90th birthday—featuring a history of jazz in the Soviet Union, as well as performances by contemporary Russian jazz musicians.

Coltrane’s music embodied the aesthetic strategies of the second half of the twentieth century, based on the ideas of indefinability of art, spontaneity in performance, and the importance of context. A series of jazz concerts ranging from early jazz subgenres to contemporary improvisation takes place in Garage Atrium, bringing music back to the building, which used to be a popular concert venue in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For a decade after its opening in 1968, the building, which then housed the restaurant Vremena Goda, was a popular concert and dance venue which attracted audiences interested in new music such as jazz and beat.

In addition, a pop-up project in Garage Atrium features rare Coltrane records from the 1950s to the 1970s, a light monument to John Coltrane by Soviet underground artist Valery Martynchik, photos of Soviet jazz enthusiasts, and an interactive object for families and kids by the Moscow-based collective Playtronica. The festival also includes series of lectures on the life and work of John Coltrane, the history of jazz in the Soviet Union, and the developments in visual culture that came about in parallel to John Coltrane’s musical experimentation.

GARAGE PUBLISHING

In September, the first two books in the New Work series—which examines in depth the making of large-scale commissions for Garage Atrium—were published in English. The first volume, Erik Bulatov, looks at the creation of the monumental diptych Come to Garage!, 2015. It includes an essay by Garage curator Snejana Krasteva exploring Bulatov’s use of monumental scale, an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and several of Bulatov’s texts spanning the period 1978–2006, which are translated to English for the first time. The second volume, Rashid Johnson, charts the making of the installation Within Our Gates, 2016. Written by Garage Chief Curator Kate Fowle, it is the first publication to follow the development of Johnson’s sculptural and installation work. The book includes an interview with the artist and an extensive essay which investigates Johnson’s influences and references.

Both books can be purchased via artbook.com.