News from GARAGE: May 2020

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has now been closed to the public for over six weeks, and our online Self-Isolation project is filling up with engaging material with remarkable speed. We are eager to share them with you; however, we also value your time and in no way encourage you to spend all day in front of the monitor. So, we have made several lists of selected materials for you, themed around your preferred quarantine pastimes.

 

TO WATCH

You can now visit an online version of our current exhibition Atelier E.B: Passer-by, developed in partnership with CROC MarTech Lab. Check out the digital panorama of the show. The texts will be available in English soon. If you have time to add to your experience, why not watch a comprehensive video interview with Lidiya Orlova, one of the founders of Russian fashion journalism. Orlova speaks of her career in Soviet and Russian fashion magazines and shows rare materials from her private archive, some of which are on display at Passer-by.

We will shortly be adding a guided digital experience of the show "We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams." The Other East and Esoteric Knowledge in Russian Art, 1905–1969. In the meantime, have a look at the fragments of performance by the participants of the project anonymous laboratory VASYARUN in the empty exhibition and museum space.

Current participant of our Field Research program—Isadorino Gore dance cooperative—has been investigating the archival materials on experimental dance in Russia and the ways to “recycle” them into a contemporary dance practice. Watch a video abstract of their training recorded at Garage Education Centre before quarantine.

 

TO READ

Our current exhibition Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture, 1966–1985 features extensive texts that detail the subject matter of the exhibition: the secret art practices and their interconnections in the Soviet Union during the era of stagnation. You can now find these texts online.

We have made available, for the first time, an excerpt in English from a study published as part of GARAGE.txt—our long-term initiative supporting researchers writing in the Russian language on contemporary art and culture. In Bastards of Cultural Relations Katarina Lopatkina explores the Soviet Union’s international artistic contacts from the 1920s to the 1950s. The translated excerpt tells the story of the Room of Contemporary Art at the Hermitage, established in the early 1930s to exhibit work by foreign artists.

Deprived of face-to-face contact with visitors, our guides and mediators are finding other ways to communicate. Twice a week our guides hold online Instagram tours around our past exhibitions, while mediators working at Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture, 1966–1985 organize regular Zoom mediation. While these events are available only in Russian, you can find out more about the work of our mediators from the diaries that they kept during this year’s Art Experiment. You’re on Air themed around odors and rhinesthesia.

We recommend exploring two new engaging long reads on the digital archival platform RAAN. Raya Lugamanova shares the dramatic experience of working on the mystical and eccentric archive of Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, who was, among other things, a master of impersonation. For Garage Archive and the Open Systems project, Antonina Trubitsyna questioned self-organizations and artist-run spaces from across Russia on how they survive the hardships brought about by the pandemic.

 

TO PLAY

We do not believe in all work and no play, and we invite you to engage in some gaming.

Garage Digital has put online several independent computer games created as part of the Eco Jam Hackathon that took place as part of The Coming World exhibition Game Club program. You can try out games from Hackathon winners and participants focused on the relationship between humans and nature.

If you prefer analogue board games, have a look at Poem Cubes by the artistic duo Rimma and Valery Gerlovin, whose works are presented at Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture, 1966–1985. In the 1970s, the Gerlovins experimented with poetry and prose and used self-made cubes with playful inscriptions on the sides to create ironic narratives. Follow our instructions to create a set of your own cubes at home.

Family Scale Games can become a playful way to cope with a confined environment and explore the impact of sizes, distances, and proportions on our perception of space. Using objects found around your home you can create a whole world on a table and train the imagination, either with your kids or on your own.

 

TO LISTEN

Check out a lineup of playlists from our music-savvy friends and partners:

1. A mindful selection of mystical and emotional tunes including music from former Middle Eastern Soviet republics compiled by DJ and producer Natalia Ganelina for the show "We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams."

2. A compilation of tracks from Russian artists and musicians spinning tracks from the 1980s to today mady made by the Garage Archive team

3. Kitchen rave playlist from Psycho Daily—a lifestyle/culture/op-ed telegram blog

4. An atmospheric mix of Soviet tunes and sounds by contemporary music artist Evgeny Gorbunov inspired by the Sekretiki exhibition

5. A list of inspirational music from Russian rap to kirtan shared with us by VASYARUN

6. A selection of comforting tracks from our anonymous colleague barricaded in her kitchen

 

CREDITS: Atelier E.B: Passer-by, panoramic view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020 © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; TOTART: Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov, Joint Responsibility, action from the series The Study of the Circle, Moscow, 1982, Courtesy of the artists; Daniela Golovushkina and Fedor Balashov, Human Connect, computer game still, Courtesy of the authors/developers