Garage Mediators

DESCRIPTION

Come and open the new Garage Museum building with us! Be a Garage Museum mediator.

Learn to read contemporary art and architecture
Look into the past to understand the present
Practice your communication and interaction skills

In June 2015, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will move to its new home in a 1968 building formerly occupied by Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) restaurant. The building, now converted into a museum, will not, however, become a white cube. It will retain its original layout, structural elements and Soviet décor to underscore the focus on Soviet modernism in Garage’s future program. This focus will be reflected in a whole range of projects, with Garage Mediators being one of the first. In this series, Garage continues its work on promoting the audience’s involvement in the museum and engaging the public in cultural co-production.

Rather than a regular museum guide, a mediator is an intermediary between the museum and visitors. Mediators can change sides, representing the institution or the audience, people who are well informed about art or those who know a little. Their work with the audience is based on dialogue and interaction, with the scope of information and the style of delivery depending on those to whom the mediator is talking. This is why Garage is looking for mediators of various ages and backgrounds, each with his or her own unique perspective on culture and the present moment. Those who make up the team of mediators will define what the visitors will learn at Garage in the summer of 2015.

Following an intensive training course taking place from March to May 2015, mediators will start work on June 13, 2015 and finish on August 2, 2015. Working in shifts from Monday to Friday, they will show visitors around, share their knowledge of the history of Garage Museum, the legacy of Soviet modernism today, and the secrets of the Vremena Goda building. Together with the visitors, they will explore the history of audience involvement in art, from the 1959 American National Exhibition and its US exhibition guides, much loved by Soviet visitors, to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s experiments in participatory art, and Július Koller’s interventions.

The project is curated by Anastasia Mityushina and Natalia Gomberg.

SCHEDULE

The full schedule you can find here. Please note that the schedule is in Russian.

The course will be comprised of 7 lectures and 7 seminars on modern and contemporary art, 20^th and 21^st century architecture, the history of museums, public speaking, and rhetoric. Participants will also be expected to spend up to 10 hours a week working at home with the texts, films, and videos provided. Lectures will start on March 6 and finish on June 1, 2015.

In May, each participant will be invited for individual classes to work on his or her unique presentation.

Mediators will work in the Museum Friday to Sunday from June 13 to August 2, 2015.

Weekly classes will take place at Garage Education Centre and Library from 18:00 to 21:00 on Tuesdays and Fridays (a one-hour lecture followed by a 20-minute break followed by a seminar of one hour 40 minutes). The complete schedule will be available on February 24, 2015.