News from Garage | October 2021

THE MAGNIFICENT FOUR

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has united with other three key Moscow art institutions—the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and GES-2 House of Culture — to create an alliance similar to MuseumsQuartier in Vienna and the Museum Miles in London and New York. On September 14, Four Museums (M4) was presented at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.

Garage Director Anton Belov commented: “In Moscow it is unprecedented for two federal museums to unite with two privately-run institutions. These are some of the most popular venues in the city that are oriented toward the international cultural agenda, which we believe is common to all of us. Dialogue with the present day is key. Moscow is becoming a city people don’t want to leave; one with a cultural offer as good as that in other metropolises.”

The Four Museums are located within walking distance of each other in a picturesque area in the center of Moscow. The M4 project is designed to enable visitors to reconsider the cultural geography of the city and plan their visits in accordance with their preferences and interests, time limitations and, in future, their level of mobility. One of the main aims of the M4 project is to create an accessible environment and promote the culture of inclusion. A trans-institutional team with members from each of the four museums is working on this issue together with independent experts and advisors with experience of disability.

At the heart of the project are curated routes around well-known and unusual city locations, museum collections and temporary exhibitions, performances, and education events. The Garage route was developed by architectural historian Anna Bronovitskaya. It introduces visitors to the architectural diversity of the M4 museums and nearby buildings.

You can find out more about M4 on the website and see the area where the museums are located in this video.

NEWS

GARAGE SCREEN 2022 ARCHITECTURAL CONCEPT

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has recently announced that LIPMAN ARCHITECTS (Moscow) will design the 2022 Garage Screen summer pavilion. Their proposal was selected by the jury from 118 applications received as part of the competition organized by consulting company KB Strelka. The project by LIPMAN ARCHITECTS is based on gabion mesh: the walls of the cinema will function as a load-bearing frame covered with metal mesh on both sides, with the space in between filled with plastic water bottles. The architects were focused on the eco-friendly agenda and wanted to use recycled materials for the construction. “Throughout the working process we reflected on the intersections that exist between architecture, cinema, and life, eventually coming to the conclusion that they are united by temporality, cyclicality, and unpredictability. That is how the idea of creating a bottle pavilion that looks more like an image or a mirage than a real-life structure emerged,” said Dmitry Lipman, founder of LIPMAN ARCHITECTS.

THE 8TH GARAGE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

The 8th Garage International Conference, Utopias of (Non)Knowledge: The Museum as a Research Hub, took place September 24–25. Sela Kodjo Adjei (National Film and Television Institute, Ghana), Clémentine Deliss (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Germany), Pauline J. Yao (M+ Museum, Hong Kong), and other participants discussed museum-based research practices. The video recording of the conference is available on the Garage YouTube channel. To coincide with the conference, co-organizer The Garage Journal published a special issue entitled “The Museum as a Research Hub,” with a reader on the same theme to follow.

GARAGE SCREEN AND FIELDS FESTIVAL OF INVENTIVE MUSIC

The Garage Screen summer cinema season closed on the first weekend of October with a two-day program of audiovisual performances, Screening 2021. This was the second joint initiative between Garage Screen and Fields Festival of Inventive Music.

The highlight of the opening day involved German electronic music pioneer Felix Kubin delivering a live soundtrack for Wolfgang Lehmann's experimental film about dragonflies and snakes. The program also included a therapeutic ambient journey by singer Sasha Vinogradova and cellist Alina Anufrienko with video artist Angelina Toros and a collaborative cross-disciplinary performance of jazz minimalists Sanscreed Kanon and video artists Ekaterina Kalashnikova and VJ Spam.

On the second day the program featured Shadowax (the alias of important Russian electronic musician Mirabella Karyanova) with a surreal AV performance visualizing techno music’s muscle mass. Art cybernetics and mechanical sound design specialist ::vtol:: re-envisioned the trills of nightingales and starlings, appearing on stage as a futuristic robotic bird. Electronic musician and composer Dima Anikin teamed up with artist Tanya Akhmetgalieva to perform a Leonid Lipavsky inspired audiovisual performance to the accompaniment of a string trio.

GARAGE PRO: PLASTICS IDENTIFICATION WORKSHOP

Garage Pro is a new program designed to encourage professional discussion of issues related to the work of contemporary museums. From October 6 to October 8 Garage hosted the first event within this program, a workshop on the preservation, documentation, and display of contemporary art and design items made using nontraditional materials, with a focus on plastics. On the opening day, Carien van Aubel, Olivia van Rooijen, Paulien ’t Hoen, and Dr. Thea B. van Oosten delivered a series of lectures on the history of the use of plastics by postwar artists and contemporary practitioners. The three-day workshop by Carien van Aubel and Olivia van Rooijen, the founders of Plastics Project, which was created at Foundation for Conservation of Contemporary Art (SBMK) in the Netherlands, showed participants methods for identifying various types of plastics, with the aim of identifying the safest approaches to their conservation and display. The workshop has previously been held at museums across the globe, including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Brussels Design Museum, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, MoMu in Antwerp, University of Amsterdam, and Kröller Müller Museum in Otterlo.

GARAGE TEENS TEAM ZINE

As part of this year’s program Garage Teens Team has published a special zine, What’s Wrong with the Teens Team? It came together as a result of Yuri Yurkin’s course What’s Wrong with Garage? The course looked at institutional critique and invited participants to reflect on their experience of being at Garage as teenagers.

The launch of the zine took place at the popular Moscow youth cafe Rovesnik. Curators and organizers of cultural and education events for teenagers, including members of the youth associations Pushkinsky. Youth and Kaskad, discussed how to engage young people in museum activities and whether museums themselves are interested in working with younger professionals and creating different expectations among their twenty-first-century visitors.

GARAGE MА STUDENTS AT THE 6TH URAL INDUSTRIAL BIENNIAL

Students and tutors of the master’s program Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Art, a joint project by Garage and the Higher School of Economics, traveled to the 6th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg for the opening. The intensive program developed for the students included meetings with the Biennial Commissioner Alisa Prudnikova, the co-curator of the main project Adnan Yildiz, and artists Behzad Khosravi-Noorii and Will Fredo, as well as mediated tours of the main project, Thinking Hands Touching Each Other, and key cultural institutions in the city. The group also took a daytrip to the nearby city of Nizhny Tagil and visited the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts and the SAMORO.doc art cluster, accompanied by curator Vladimir Seleznev.

SINGLE COPY 2022 PARTICIPANTS ANNOUNCED

Garage Library has selected new participants for the 2022 iteration of the project Single Copy, which supports the medium of the artist's book in Russia. They are Lera Lerner (St. Petersburg), Denis Uranov (Tomsk), and Dima Filippov (Moscow). Each of the artists will create an original artist's book that will become part of Garage Library by the end of March 2022. The works will be on view in showcases in the Library reading room. The presentation of the books and a meeting with the artists will take place in April 2022.

CREDITS: © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Design for 2022 Garage Screen summer pavilion, 2021. Courtesy LIPMAN ARCHITECTS; Discussion at the 8th Garage International Conference. On the screen L–R Joana Monbaron and Tahani Nadim. Seated L-R Yana Klichuk, Danae Tapia, and Clémentine Deliss. Photo: Anton Donikov © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Felix Kubin at Screening 2021. Photo: Dasha Pocherk © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Plastics Identification Workshop at Garage, October 2021. Photo: Maria Dupovkina © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Dasha Glushkova. What’s Wrong with the Teens Team? zine cover; Garage MА Students at the 6th Ural Industrial Biennial, 2021. Photo: Alexandra Lyulina © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Dima Filippov, Cover of a Nonexistent Book, 2021. Collage. Courtesy of the artist