The Arsenal in Nizhny Novgorod will show Co-thinkers, the key project within Garage Museum of Contemporary Art’s regional exhibition program for 2019.
Co-thinkers is an experimental exhibition project developed in 2016 by the team at Garage. It is a modular exhibition that is different in every iteration, and is the result of a collaboration between professional curators, collectors who lent works, and a team of devoted visitors to the Museum.
In Yekaterinburg in 2017 the project was adapted to the local situation through the public program. In Nizhny Novgorod it is being re-produced from scratch, the format responding to the needs of the Arsenal and its co-thinkers. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with five Arsenal visitors for whom the institution has become a space for personal fulfilment, growth, and meeting others through encounters with contemporary art. Executive director of the Association of the Families of Deafblind People Yulia Kremneva, retired Arsenal invigilator Svetlana Zhuravlyova, inclusive theater projects participant Ekaterina Krylova, chef and ex-barista at the Arsenal Yevlad, and the head of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the All-Russian Society for the Deaf Andrey Savushkin took part in every stage of preparation, from the selection of works to exhibition design.
Two exhibition spaces at Arsenal will become a “backyard,” a place that promises a safe environment for every person to grow and learn and offers great opportunities for self-discovery. The works exhibited in this space are windows into the bottomless pool of ideas and knowledge created by the key international artists of the second half of the twentieth century and recent decades, as well as being topics for discussion. Co-thinkers features works by Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Marc Quinn, Melvin Moti, Rob Pruitt, Neo Rauch, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, all from private collections.
Over its four-month run the exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive public program, developed in collaboration with the five co-thinkers. It includes tours, discussions in the exhibition space, and masterclasses for visitors with and without disabilities.