Exhibitions in GARAGE: September 2018

Dear Friends,

Since the start of 2018, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has assembled some of its most ambitious projects to date, as part of its 10th anniversary programming. This fall promises to be no exception, with the Museum debuting a new film on Ilya and Emilia Kabakov; a book on the Soviet Modernist architecture of Almaty in Kazakhstan; new reading groups at Garage Library; and five new exhibition projects with an intergenerational line up of artists who challenge our understanding of what resonates in art and architecture today.
 
Things kick off September 12 with The Fabric of Felicity, an ambitious international exhibition that looks at clothing outside the realm of fashion and bauhaus imaginista. Moving Away: The Internationalist Architect, which traces the complex relationship between the Bauhaus and the Soviet Union through the life and work of former Bauhaus teachers and students who moved to Moscow. Then on September 15, Garage will celebrate the inaugural project at Tselinnyi, Kazakhstan’s first center for contemporary culture, in Almaty. Curated by architect Ekaterina Golovatyuk and developed in collaboration with Garage, Beginning is a three-part project covering architecture, art, and cinema, reflecting on the state of the building and the city, and outlining the structure of the center’s future program.
 
Next up at the end of September is the first show of Marcel Broodthaers in Russia and two new commissions—each also a first—for Damián Ortegaand Anri Sala. For further information on all the projects scroll down.
 
Finally, after exactly five years of penning this letter monthly, it's time to expand the voices you hear from at Garage. Starting in October, one of the nine curators who now work at the Museum will be giving you an introduction to our activities as they unfold.

All the best,

Kate Fowle
Garage Chief Curator

 

GARAGE EXHIBITIONS

THE FABRIC OF FELICITY

September 12, 2018 – January 27, 2019

The Fabric of Felicity is an international project that examines the relationship between society, the artist, and clothing in the twenty-first century. With such diverse inspirations as the Indian epic Mahabharata, Roland Barthes, and Charles Dickens, the exhibition features over forty artists who investigate “clothing universals” in their practices and use apparel as a metaphor devoid of the fashion context and its typical presentation formats: magazines and runways. Artists from Bangladesh, the UK, Russia, the US, Sweden, and elsewhere have contributed works depicting clothing as a set of signs associated with various communities; symbols of longing for a “golden age” or an “age of innocence;” tools in the civil rights struggle; or a means of communication. Moreover, they constitute a power, a natural flow, from which the exhibition extracts the most striking evocations of clothing codes.

 

BAUHAUS IMAGINISTA. MOVING AWAY:
THE INTERNATIONALIST ARCHITECT

September 12 – November 30, 2018

Moving Away: The Internationalist Architecttraces the complex relationship between the Bauhaus and the Soviet Union through the life and work of former Bauhaus teachers and students who moved to Moscow: the second Bauhaus director, Hans “Hannes” Meyer; architect and urban planner, Conrad Püschel; Philipp Tolziner, who ended up living the rest of his life in Moscow; and Lotte Stam-Beese, who worked on the city plan of Orsk from 1930 to 1935. Drawing on archival materials, artist Alisa Creischer; curator and theorist Doreen Mende; architectural historian and artist Tatiana Efrussi; and artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh are the “reporters” who have traced and interpreted their adventures.
 
Developed by Marion von Osten and Grant Watson as part of a multi-platform, the two-year international project bauhaus imaginista, running up to the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus in 2019, has been commissioned by the German Ministry of Culture. A workshop with the curators and “reporters” will take place on September 12 from 17:30–21:00 in Garage Auditorium. Free entrance, registration is required.

 

MARCEL BROODTHАERS. POETRY AND IMAGES

This fall, Garage presents the first solo exhibition in Russia of critically acclaimed Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976). Developed specifically for the 10th anniversary of the Museum, the exhibition reveals what the artist once described as “the place where the world of visual art and poetry may perhaps […] converge on the exact dividing line that absorbs both.” Presenting over eighty works, including many of the artist’s key pieces—from early objects and films, to sections of the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles; as well as his last installations, also known as décors—the show will reveal why Broodthaers’ use of language and unique take on institutional critique led to a cult following among Russian artists and the potential for rethinking the values of the museum, a mission Garage has undertaken since its inception ten years ago.

 

ANRI SALA. THE LAST RESORT

September 29, 2018 – January 27, 2019

For Garage’s sixth Atrium Commission, Anri Sala is responding to the architecture and acoustics of the 9.5-meter high space, by developing a site-specific work featuring thirty-eight snare drums suspended from the ceiling. At the core of the installation is a new rendition of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, written in 1791. One of the composer’s last works, the composition has become closely associated with the Enlightenment, which was a time when European nations were rethinking the constructs of politics and science. Exploring the cultural complexity of the period, Sala distorts the composition by replacing the original tempo indications with instructions based on wind conditions recorded by émigré James Bell during his sea voyage from England to Australia. “My aim was to compose with corruption,” he explains. “I wanted to imagine […] what would become of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto if it were to float and drift like a message in a bottle, until it is washed ashore after a long voyage.”
 
The Last Resort will open with an orchestral performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major by New Music Studio ensemble at Garage Atrium on September 29, 2018.

 

DAMIÁN ORTEGA. THE MODERN GARDEN

From the end of September, Garage Square will be occupied by a newly commissioned, large-scale installation by Damián Ortega. His first solo presentation in Russia, The Modern Garden will be a place for meeting and interpreting the various implications associated with the legacy of modernism, park sculptures, and the recyclable nature of materials. Expanding beyond their individual limits, the works reflect on sculpture’s monumental character in the public space: read from above, they are as an architectural message, an agglomeration of elements that combine to look like a city—or at least a prototype of one—while at ground-level visitors can wander between the objects with the optics of a flȃneur strolling through a traditional European sculpture park.

 

 

GARAGE SCREEN

PREMIER: POOR FOLK. KABAKOVS

To mark Ilya Kabakov’s 85th birthday, Garage has produced a documentary film on the life and work of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the star duo of Russian contemporary art. Directed by Anton Zhelnov, Poor Folk. Kabakovs takes its name from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel published in Russia and reflects the artists’ choice of characters for their works: ordinary people and the small dramas of their life in the Soviet Union. The documentary was filmed over 2017 and 2018 at the Kabakovs’ home on Long Island (USA) and in St. Petersburg. It includes previously unpublished photographs and videos from their personal archive and from Garage Archive Collection.

 

THE MOSCOW INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL (MIEFF)

From September 29 to October 2 Garage together with MIEFF (Moscow International Experimental Film Festival) will present The Deserted (2017), the first VR film of the acclaimed film artist Tsai Ming Liang, whose extensive body-of-work deeply explores the existential condition of a contemporary man, as well as complex relations between humans and their environment. One of the most visionary filmmakers working today, Tsai Ming Liang conceptually applies VR technology as an organic tool to create an immersive space-time continuum examining its dimensions, both physical and transcendental. 

 

GARAGE ARCHIVE AND LIBRARY

THE ANNUAL RESEARCH PROGRAM ARCHIVE SUMMER 2018 COMES TO A CLOSE.

This summer, Garage Archive welcomed six researchers from Russia and abroad who each spent one month in Moscow. Independent researcher Marina Israilova (Saint Petersburg) studied documents from Open Systems Collection to complete her research project on Russian apartment galleries and other self-organized initiatives since the 2000s; Assistant at the Department of Slavic Studies, University of Belgrade, Elena Kusovats worked on her book and a lecture cycle on the underground poetry and art of the Moscow Conceptualist School. Independent curator Elena Zaitseva (London) looked for materials on women artists in Moscow Conceptualism, including Elena Elagina, Irina Nakhova, and Maria Chuikova, for her future exhibition projects and writings; Independent Researcher Giada Dalla Bontà (Berlin) studied documents relating to the art and literary works by Nikita Alexeev for her future monograph on the artist.  Two researchers will continue to work in the archive until September. Art historian Angelina Ronkina (London) is studying the role of women in the art of the Soviet Union, while Associate Professor at Institute for Liberal Arts, Tokyo, Aia Kawamura has focused her research on Soviet Kinetic Art and in particular Lev Nussberg and Dvizheniye collective.

 

FALL SEASON’S READING GROUPS AT GARAGE LIBRARY

This Fall, Garage Library reading groups include Marx, Engels, Kollontai; Theatre of Participation: From Mass Spectacles to Participatory Art; Bauhaus and Modernist Architecture; Film Theory: The One and the Other; Collective Traumas: How and Why Do We Speak about the Horrible (Im)Possible?, as well as Time of History, Time of Today organized in conjunction with Garage’s 6th international conference To Which Time Do We Belong? The New Historicity and The Politics of Time, which will take place from October 26 to 27, 2018.

Group participants will study suggested texts before each meeting, where they will be discussed with moderators. Admission is free with advance registration.