Garage Teens Team: peer-to-peer

The soon-to-be physician and a concerned researcher Katya Khachatryan will outline a system approach to technology-based artworks and her experience of interaction with them.

The workshop will begin with the analysis of techno art: how to handle it and why it is especially important to learn the scientific implications behind such projects. During the practical block, the group and the tutor will attempt to collectively conceptualize various biological processes, sophisticated technologies, and even black holes!

About the lecturer

Katya Khachatryan is a graduate of the second Garage Teens Team course and a medical student.

Nilya Musaeva will present her two-hour-long workshop on the visibility of people suffering from the imposter syndrome and the ways to cope with this condition.

Following a theoretical introduction, an informal conversation, and a number of exercises, the participants will try to overcome the syndrome having deliberately pretended to be imposters.

About the lecturer

Nilya Musaeva is a graduate of the second Garage Teens Team course, graduate of the project SKBT at the Polytechnic Museum (curatorial studies). She is currently completing the program Design and Coding at NRU HSE. Nilya has contributed as an artist and curator to the youth projects of Garage and the Polytechnic Museum, and collaborated with independent curators and artists (including the KhZ series of exhibitions and a personal show curated by Alexander Zhuravlev).

The workshop will scrutinize different methods of analyzing theoretical papers on contemporary art issues.

Teens Team members will develop skills required for working with texts: they will learn how to reveal its inner structure, determine the main thesis and its evolvement. The two-part class will also allow participants to examine performative texts in order to define the way they are structured and function.

“Reading as a practice of reading into” is also an opportunity to get rid of the block of “complicated literature” and the fear of misunderstanding text—some of the most common feelings that often impede reading and turn it into a painful process.

About the lecturers

Nastya Volynova is a graduate of the Russian Art History Department of the History Faculty of Moscow State University, student of The Contemporary Art Theory program at Goldsmiths University London. Graduate of the inaugural Garage Teens Team and tutor at its second edition.

Natela Pilia is a Garage Teens Team teacher and tutor, head of the project Shalash aimed to help children in difficult life situations develop learning skills. Natela studies at the Institute for Educational Studies at NRU HSE, specializing in the development of socio-emotional abilities in school students.

The participants will learn how to develop a dialogue around contemporary art with very diverse audiences and how to handle one’s own perception and stereotypes.

Discussing topics dealing with contemporary art implies that sooner or later you would come across comments such as “Art must be beautiful!” or “It used to be better!” and the necessity to defend your position. It is no easier however to maintain a conversation when the interlocutor deliberately complicates communication by referencing critical articles, mentioning names of famous artists and trying to disprove the opponent’s viewpoint. The group will discuss how to benefit from such tricky situations and turn the most awkward conversation around contemporary art into a productive one.

Drawing particular attention to individual perception of art, the participants will try to figure out how to stop feeling like amateurs and develop a critical approach to art, while also discussing why it is worth going to the museum anyway, even without proper preparation and knowledge about the works and artists on show.

About the lecturer

Polina Trifonova is graduate of the inaugural Garage Teens Team (2013–2016). She has worked as a guide at the New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val and art mediator at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Polina currently studies Theory and History of Literature at NRS – HSE and gives English lessons.

Part one of the workshop is devoted to the history of podcasting and the specificity of the medium. Participants will find out how podcasts are made, starting from the original idea to the writing of a script, sound editing, and promotion of the project. Aglaya Dvornikova will talk about the making of her own project Kulturny kod—a podcast on contemporary culture.

About the speaker

Aglaya Dvornikova is a former member of Garage Teens Team, creator of the podcast Kulturny kod. She is currently a student at the Faculty of Communication, Media, and Design at National Research University—Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

The course is dedicated to art practices that transform the space of a contemporary city and our self-perception within it, such as flâneurism, street art, and political activism.

For several years, the street has become a key platform for an artistic and political statement. Mass rallies, performances, queues for a pair of sneakers, and even seasonal confiture festivals are rare examples representing the Muscovites’ collective life in the age of total virtualization.

Urban space embodies enormous potential for investigation and action. The more sophisticated its structure is the more fearful becomes its public image, the more it conceals behind its seemingly banal exterior, and the more varied is our experience of being present in it. How to isolate oneself in this chaos? How to use the public sphere for self-expression? Who are the guards, partisans and researchers thereof? The course provides answers to these questions by tracing the history of relations between man and city from dandies to hype beasts, from Guy Debord to Pussy Riot, and from Jean-Michel Basquiat to the A.D.E.D collective.

About the lecturers

Gosha Chubukin is an artist and designer with a Bachelor’s degree in Communication, Media and Design from National Research University – Higher School of Economics (2019), where he is currently doing a Master’s in Art Direction at the HSE School of Art and Design. Graduate of the first Garage Teens Team. Participant of several group and one-man shows, including the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. Author of various projects for Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Center of Documentary Cinema in the Museum of Moscow, and Petr Fomenko Workshop Theater.

Members of the workshops will develop an art object based on the associative analysis of the walking route connecting Garage Museum of Contemporary Art with the Oktyabrskaya metro station.

Every day, without even noticing it, we encounter with multiple associations. On the subconscious level, one object resembles another. Events, places, faces of friends and the people we know, texts of books, movie scenes, Instagram “stories”, photos and paintings merge into a single stream of information and sometimes intersect with each other in the most unexpected and curious way. It takes a certain skill to translate complex information, such as that of a text or an art object, into an easier-to-understand language.

Participants will practice such translation using a very simple and familiar example—the walking route connecting Garage with the Oktyabrskaya metro station, while also assembling a map featuring associative titles, collages, and illustrations in the process.

Why the map? The symbolic representation of any route necessarily implies the development of a system of signs and indicators which puts the author into a particular paradigm and helps them to classify the received information. Maps compiled by travelers and pathfinders are created in the search of the new. Maps aiming to make an artistic gesture comprehensible for the widest possible audience are developed by artists (like Yoko Ono’s Map Piece, 1962) and designers (like the alternative maps of the Moscow underground by Yandex, 2019, and BraMC Studio, 1998).

About the lecturer

Nastya Savelyeva is a graduate of the second Garage Teens Team course, volunteer at Strelka KB’s education program. Contributor to the preparation of the International Student Architecture Forum in Nizhny Novgorod, and one of the editors on the project Chto po vystavkam? (What about the exhibitions?).