Garage is in self-isolation: news and online resources
Dear Friends,
Garage is in self-isolation: our buildings are temporarily closed, while our team continue to work online inventing new ways of interacting with visitors and with each other. A rare passer-by walking in Gorky Park peeks through the Museum door, but the pavilion is quiet. It's been over a week since screens replaced display cases at Garage. The simplest solution in the current situation would be to try and create a museum with home delivery: contactless and safe. However, online tours and panoramic exhibition views might not be able to replace the immediate experience of a museum visit. The digitalization of everything does not guarantee mindful encounters. Often it creates interactions that are passive and superficial. On the other hand, now—when the space has imploded and expanded at the same time; when we find ourselves confused, staring into our laptops in empty rooms—the digital can become an agent of a different kind of closeness.
Our department of digital marketing and web technology has turned into a home-based publishing office, and the entire Garage team—from Exhibitions and Research to the security service—are busy producing content. As if opening up some non-existent vaults, we have discovered not dusty archives, but stories and unique voices. We play with genres and try to use the new limitations in a constructive way: we create new experiences and formats of communication; move mediation and reading groups to Zoom; reinvent our public program, activate the viral potential of Garage Digital and shoot a mystical horror for TikTok to rechannel anxieties. Self-isolated and existing by ourselves, we are learning to live together in a new sci-fi reality.
Of course, self-isolation does not mean that we have to spend all our time online. We are all free to leave our screens and finally do what we have been putting off for a rainy day.
Stay safe and follow our news!
Maria Aleksanyan, Evgeniya Kuptsova, Darya Litovchenko,
Nikita Nechaev, Darya Ostratenko, Anya Pigareva, and Sonia Romanova
NEWS
Following the outbreak and escalating spread of the coronavirus infection Garage took measures to minimize potential risk and closed all its public premises. From March,14, 2020 the Museum, studios, archive, library, education center, and office space have been temporarily closed..
Such a volatile situation inspired the Garage team to take time for self-reflection, experiment, and launch the Self-Isolation project. This online resource will exist as an experiment and investigation into our relationship with audiences, activities, archives, and ourselves. The platform will be regularly updated with materials in diverse formats such as texts, videos, online games, playlists, live transmissions etc., and will also include rare and unconventional content. Selected materials will be available in English.
Garage Academic Programs are also moving online with a preliminary plan to remain in this format until the middle of April. Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Art MA has already transmitted to its seventeen students without a single academic day missed via Zoom lectures and seminars that they can attend from home. Contemporary Art: An Introduction to History and Museum and Exhibition Practices—an elective course of two hundred and ten students within the BA programs of Garage’s partner the Higher School of Economics (HSE)—is following. Our Academic Programs team remains positive about these changes and sees it as a unique experiment in academia that can lead to new developments.
GARAGE ONLINE RESOURCES
Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN) is an online catalogue of documents on the history of Russian contemporary art initiated by Garage in 2017. RAAN is updated daily by the teams at Garage archive and its six international partner institutions. The most recent addition features materials from the collections acquired by Garage archive in 2018–2019. These include photographs and documents from the funds of Victor and Margarita Tupitsyn—curators and art theorists, who were deeply involved in the Soviet unofficial art scene and made significant contribution to its academic acknowledgement outside of Russia. A further remarkable archive related to the popularization of Russian artists is the collection of documents from Moskovskaya Palitra gallery. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, Moskovskaya Palitra was one of the first galleries to open in Moscow, and was also the first one to establish branches across Europe and exhibit Russian art internationally.
Books from Garage’s international publishing program are available for free on the Bookmate reading app. Erik Bulatov: Come to Garage! focuses on the inaugural Garage Atrium Commission created by the artist for the opening of the Museum at the Vremena Goda building in 2015. Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade 1986–1996 and Access Moscow: The Art Life of a City Revealed 1990–2000 provide access to the research and materials in Garage Archive Collection. Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates follows the making of the artist’s new project for Garage Atrium in 2016.
CREDITS: © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020; © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020; Online lecture of Garage and HSE MA students © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020; Materials from Moskovskaya Palitra fond from Garage archive © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019; Photo by Fyodor Kandinsky © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018.
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