Block 2. Museums and communities

The second weekend of the conference Experiencing the Museum is a reflection on the role of communities in the inclusive practices of cultural institutions. The word “community” can be heard more and more frequently in relation to the museum context, with museums striving to create or accumulate around them various communities, such as deaf visitors or people with migration experience. Engaging such audiences seems to be a perfect opportunity to make the museum space more open and polyphonic as well as instigate profound shifts in established practices and relationships through the development of new narratives around museum objects, exhibitions, or subjective relationships.

On February 18, Garage will run a workshop on the principles of launching new interpretations of museum objects, a discussion based around the work of Russian and British cultural institutions with various communities, and a workshop on the methods for evaluating the effectiveness of inclusive practices.

The events within the Museums and Communities block are organized with the support of the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Moscow as part of the UK – Russia Creative Bridge 2021–2022 international program.

Museum collections (especially ethnographic) bring together objects related to a particular stage in the life of a community to create an illusion of its representation. Such objects are moved and analyzed depending on the personalities who placed them in the museum environment. Such politics is called into question today.

Workshop visitors are invited to rework texts and stories accompanying selected items from museum displays. Together with experts, the Museum staff, and activists, participants will suggest new labels for select items of Kubachi* ceramics from the collections of Russian and British museums. One possible strategy, for example, is to shift the focus to the origin of a particular object and its connection with the community. This collective action is set to become a reflection on a new interpretation of museum exhibits and forms of inter-museum interaction, whereby all participants would be heard and have equal rights.

*Kubachi is a mountain village in Dagestan, whose dwellers have preserved in their home collections multiple examples of fifteenth–eighteenth-century Iranian dishes.

Hosts

Nastya Indrikova is an independent researcher of museum collections. She is the ethnographic and photo editor at EastEast, author of the Telegram channel Murmolka about museum anthropology, former photo director and producer of the project Big Museum and photo editor of the educational project Arzamas.

Shaheen Kasmani is an artist, educator, producer, and curator. She co-curated The Past is Now exhibition at Birmingham Museum in 2017–2018. Shaheen specializes in Islamic Art using paper and textiles and aims for her work to be part of telling a story and reclaiming forgotten narratives.

Attending the conference is available with advance registration.

REGISTRATION

Participants will have access to simultaneous interpretation to Russian and Russian Sign Language.

The event will take place at Garage Education Center in a hybrid format. Participation is possible online or offline. Please indicate the format convenient for you in the registration form.

Operating in the direction of inclusion and, in a broader sense, of social justice, museums are increasingly focusing on people, seeking to establish communication and build a dialogue with various audiences. Within this vein, inclusive programs are positioned as work with communities. However, it is not always obvious what these communities are and by what criteria they unite or are being united in the practices of cultural institutions.

Participants

Siobhán Forshaw is a curator and researcher, currently working as Curator: Community Programs at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, UK. She will present on Voices That Matter, a two-year project at the Whitechapel Gallery that collaborated with women and people of marginalized genders living in London's East End, from mostly Bangladeshi and Somali origins. The project opened up questions about the dominance of spoken English in the art world and the politics of translation when delivering learning and participation programming.

Marianna Kruchinski is public programs curator at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art, Krasnodar. She is responsible for the Center’s film program and for the design of inclusive projects in cooperation with the Generation, Open Environment, and Good South foundations.

Marianna will talk about her experience of launching a dance laboratory as part of the Garage Screen Film Festival and other practices of interacting with the city’s various communities.

Attending the conference is available with advance registration.

REGISTRATION

The event will take place at Garage Education Center with broadcast on the Museum's YouTube channel.

What do we hope to achieve with inclusive programs? As workers of cultural institutions, we aim to create the feeling of belonging, empowerment, confidence, and comfort. However, these notions are difficult to measure objectively. Since inclusion work is never visibly finished, how can success be measured?

This two-part workshop will explore measuring impact and change achieved through inclusive programs by exploring motivations, imagined futures, and risk assessments. We will begin exploring the theory and then analyze a case study to work together and see, during the practical session, how to apply some of these ideas to measure impact and change achieved, as well as how to report on them to achieve transparency and advocate for the further development and promotion of inclusive practices.

Host

Rachael Minott is a Jamaican-born artist, curator, and researcher. She is currently Inclusion and Change Manager at the National Archives and trustee of the Museum of Homelessness. Researcher and co-curator of the exhibitions The Past is Now: Birmingham and the British Empire (2017), Within and Without: Body Image and the Self (2018) with Birmingham Museums Trust. As an artist, she has exhibited in the 4th Ghetto Biennale in Port au Prince, Haiti (2015) and the Jamaica Biennial (2017) and held her solo show Thinking about Jamaica at Willesden Gallery, London (2019).

Attending the conference is available with advance registration.

REGISTRATION

Participants will have access to simultaneous interpretation into Russian and Russian Sign Language.

The event will take place at Garage Education Center in a hybrid format, with the possibility of online and offline participation. Please indicate the format convenient for you in the registration form.

This year, the conference Experiencing the Museum invites participants to explore new formats (to add variety to the usual lectures) and new locations (to spark up dialogue and interactions in non-obvious places that exist parallel to culture and education). Going outside the museum can help find the next required steps “after inclusion,” which will require a flexible approach to dealing with various degrees of exclusion that exists on all levels of access to knowledge and cultural values. This is why the conference will take place at the shopping mall MEGA Teply Stan. Artists Katrin Nenasheva, Aziza Kadyri, and the creative collective Pobegi will show their projects targeted at interaction with chance—or at least unprepared—participants.

As the space of the shopping mall can bring together people with different experiences and belonging to different communities, artistic interactions there offer a a logical continuation to the conference’s ambition to work with communities and the questions of difference in general.

Installation: forest

The "shoots collective invites MEGA visitors to forest—an installation featuring video documentation of the winter landscape nearest to the shopping center.

Workshop: Co-creation on the Shopping Center's Digital Layer

The shopping center often becomes the only free accessible venue for young people to socialize and spend time together. Artist Aziza Kadiri wonders whether standardized mall spaces can operate as a real safe place and invites visitors to a joint reflection and workshop.

Action: Quarrel with Me

Artist Katrin Nenasheva invites visitors to a shopping center to talk about diversity—of experiences, cultures, perceptions—in a dialogue-based game format. At the tables of MEGA's restaurant patio, Tasty Boulevard, you can discuss a story proposed by the artist or tell your own. The stories declared during the action will be documented on a typewriter and appear on the food court tables in real-time.

Discussion-performance: after a winter forest walk

We invite MEGA visitors to sit down at our table and discuss the projects on view today. Let's look together for answers to the following questions: what negative or positive emotions do certain artworks invoke in you? What is contemporary art, and why can it seem incomprehensible? What is the figure of an artist?

REGISTRATION

Free transfer from Teply Stan Metro to MEGA Teply Stan and back will be provided for registered participants of the event.

Taking Tod Browning's classic film Freaks as a starting point, Salome Chasnoff looks back at the history of the representation of disability in Hollywood, discussing particular cases with activists, researchers and filmmakers.

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