The End of the Summer and the Beginning of the New Season | GARAGE

THE END OF THE SUMMER AND THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW SEASON

"August is a flatland, a plane, a still pond. It is a month of reduced activity and the global school break," as the German writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge put it. It is a time for bookishness and focused work when the outside world goes silent. However, Kluge suggests you also be careful, as "this is what makes August so dangerous. A universal decision to leave one another alone for a while, to keep the stress levels down. Exactly this." So stay awake, but make good use of this time! For this, we have prepared for you a selection of recently published longreads by Garage curators and some of the artists with whom we collaborate.

In the run-up to the opening of Tomás Saraceno. Moving Atmospheres, the curator of the project Iaroslav Volovod had an extensive conversation with the artist. The talk diverts from the aerosolar sculpture being installed at Garage to a much broader discussion. Saraceno and Volovod spoke about the Russian avant-garde, gravity, feminism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Aerocene epoch, a new era that stands in stark contrast to the lingering eco-traumas of the Anthropocene and is inhabited by people, insects, animals, spores, cyanobacteria, and more that already live in this ocean of air.
 
Read the full interview in Strelka mag—the bilingual online magazine of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. 

What about gender metamorphosis among the indigenous communities of the Russian Far East? In a commissioned text for 13th Gwangju Biennale curators, Iaroslav Volovod and Valentin Diaconov write on queer forms of sexual and biopolitical creativity and the female spirits who frequently bested their creators. These unorthodox practices fascinated researchers on the verge of the twentieth century while they were severely oppressed later in Soviet times.
 
The text refers to Congo Art Works: Popular Painting presented at Garage in 2017. In order to connect this survey of late twentieth century Congolese art and its exploration of colonialism and the post-colonial condition to the Russian context, Volovod and Diaconov developed a show within a show, which examined the art of Chukotka. This region in the Far East of Eurasia became part of the Soviet Union shortly after the October Revolution. Congo Art Works: Popular Painting was developed by the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), Tervuren in collaboration with BOZAR, Brussels, and curated by Bambi Ceuppens and Sammy Baloji.

Sharon Kivland—artist, curator, writer, and participant in The Fabric of Felicity (2018–2019)—spends a significant part of her year at a small commune Plouër-sur-Rance on the northwestern coast of France. Besides Sharon and her partner, the sculptor Ron Haselden, the atmospheric house, surrounded by the garden, is inhabited by a group of adopted animals. During self-isolation, the artist found herself busy with a new pastime, regular garden readings to her cat Celeste. Sharon Kivland shared with us and Harper's Bazaar, Russia, a special essay on her experience.

In the framework of Afrah Shafiq's current Field Research project, Garage commissioned the first Russian translation and published the original English version of the iconic feminist text Sultana's Dream. Written in 1905 by the Bengali suffragette, educator, and South Asia's pioneer of women's education Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, this short story presents utopian science-based and nature-attentive society with established matriarchy. The publication features illustrations by contemporary Indian artist Chitra Ganesh that bring to mind Indian comic strips of the 1960s and vintage illustrations to fantasy and popular science books. Inspired by Sultana's Dream, Afrah Shafiq has created an online video game Sultana's Reality—a feminist quest in an Alice in Wonderland style.

Garage Digital has started to publish articles on different aspects of video games as a new and developing visual language in contemporary culture. Read the first four texts of this ongoing compilation:

1. (a very brief) GAME STUDIES READER by Daria Kalugina (video game researcher and columnist at Haywire magazine)
2. Video games and contemporary art by Dasha Nasonova (architect and game designer and the founder of Adagia video game studio).
3. Handmade Pixels Reader by Dima Vesnin (game designer, teacher on Creative Writing MA at the Higher School of Economics, Russia, author of Backtracking, a Telegram channel on game design and procedural generation).
4. In-Game Photography by Konstantin Remizov (artist and media researcher, editor of INGAME community )

NEWS

Garage is getting ready for the new exhibition season! Stay tuned for the opening of the 2nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art: A Beautiful Night for All the People and Tomás Saraceno. Moving Atmospheres. International traveling is still limited, however, we do not want to miss the opportunity to present to you our new shows. Join Anton Belov, director at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and Ruth Addison, chief editor at Garage, for an introductory talk as a part of the projects' preview, followed by an English-language tour of the exhibitions—and live Q&A session with the curators. The online event will take place on September 8, 2020 at 12pm ET, 5pm GMT, and 7pm MST. To participate, follow the link that will be sent in the next email closer to the date.

For the first time in its history, Garage announced an open call for Russian-based artists and artistic groups to select participants for a future exhibition. Created during lockdown, the project aims to support the local artistic community and redirect energies toward the production of new work. Between 20 and 25 projects, with no limitations on the media, selected through the open call will be presented in a group exhibition at Garage next year. Each participant will receive an artist fee, a production budget (where applicable), and organizational assistance. Applications are being accepted until September 1, 2020. The participants of the show will be announced by November 1, 2020.

In 2020 Garage has been selected to be the Museum of the Year at Cosmoscow International Contemporary Art Fair that will take place in Moscow from September 11 to September 13. The Museum will present a booth based on its Archive Collection of Russian contemporary art. Organized as an interactive cabinet of curiosities, the booth will introduce visitors to various video formats and ways of processing them and will feature equipment for the storage, restoration, and digitization of analog video. In addition, Cosmoscow Foundation for Contemporary Art is making significant contributions to Garage Archive Collection: the archive of Navicula Artis Gallery (St. Petersburg), a handwritten album/catalogue by Evgeny and Lev Kropivnitsky, and the archive of Andrey Chirkov (Remizov), which contains correspondence with Andrei Sinyavsky.

CREDITS: View of Garage building and Yerbossyn Meldibekov's Transformer. Photo: Daniil Annenkov © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Tomás Saraceno Sobrevolando Moscú (Flying Over Moscow), 2004, photo collage. Courtesy of the artist; Congo Art Works: Popular Painting, installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2017. Photo: Ivan Erofeev © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Sharon Kivland, Reading to Celeste, 2020. Photo: Ron Haselden © Sharon Kivland; Chitra Ganesh Sultana's Dream, 2018, series of 27 linocuts, printed by Durham Press, Inc. Courtesy of the artist and Durham Press, Inc.; Kitulya Hell, image for the Open Call project, 2020; World of Warcraft, 2004, blizzard, screenshot; Garage Archive. Photo: Anastasia Ivanova © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art