Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will play host to the third annual Point of Displacement Festival dedicated to migration and ethnocultural diversity. Timed to coincide with World Refugee Day, the festival addresses the phenomenon of migration in a broader sense, including forced, labor, domestic, women’s, and children’s migration, revealing and making visible current movements in the entire diversity of forms.
This year, as part of its festival program, the Museum is shifting the focus from migration processes to the more multifaceted issue of ethnocultural diversity. The program embraces four blocks: theater, music, academic block, and a block for kids and teens. All events are reflections on how different people live side by side, and different cultures coexist within one person.
The theater block includes a show of the installation performance Rohingya, directed by Tufan Imamutdinov (Kazan). The play is composed of memories of the persecution of the Rohingya people, collected in a refugee camp in Bangladesh by actor Egor Belov. The screening will run at Garage Screen summer cinema. Detailed information about the event is available below in the Festival Schedule section.
The music block brings together performances by musicians of the ethnographic label Ored Recordings. Every evening during the week of June 14 to 20, Garage will host performances by musicians whose work is a search and experiment at the intersection of traditional and contemporary music. The program has ten performances on offer, including an Ossetian folk revival, a Lezghin storyteller from South Dagestan, an Udmurt rave, black metal based on Circassian ritual melodies, and a Tajik instrumental orchestra. Detailed information about the event is available below in the Festival Schedule section.
Complementing the music and performance events, the academic block includes public discussions and talks on the interweaving of ethnicities and cultures within one society or individual. A lecture by researcher Marit Kremer will explain how it is expressed in everyday life, using the example of young natives of Chechnya who grew up in Germany. The discussion Tradition and/or Freedom of Expression in Post-Soviet Cultural Practices is a conversation about the possibility of individual self-expression within the context of living in rigid cultural canons. Separate events are dedicated to the contemporary and traditional music of the North Caucasus and independent Russian record labels.
The block for kids and teens features creative workshops, as well as talks with teenagers about ethnic and cultural diversity through the discussion of popular videos on the TikTok social network.
The Point of Displacement Festival has been held since 2019. Its organizers include the State Tretyakov Gallery, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Moscow, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Neighbors’ Languages School education project, and “Kids are Kids” Integration Center for Refugee and Migrant Children. Joining the festival’s program this year are Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, the Polytechnic Museum, and the “Children of St. Petersburg” Public Organization.
