<p class="p1">Due to the expansion of open storage, from August 3 Garage Library will no longer be located in the Seasons of the Year pavilion. The new location and opening date will be announced later.</p>

Please note

<p class="p1">Due to&nbsp;the expansion of&nbsp;open storage, from August 3 Garage Library will no&nbsp;longer be&nbsp;located in&nbsp;the Seasons of&nbsp;the Year pavilion. The new location and opening date will be&nbsp;announced later.</p>

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<p class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__text--tableCell">The exhibition is&nbsp;wheelchair accessible</p>
<a class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__link" href="/ru/visit/disabled_visitors?kind=blind">Learn more</a></div>
<div class="ex-modal__content__row"><i class="info-bar__icon info-bar__deaf info-bar__noCursor ex-modal__icon"></i>
<p class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__text--tableCell">Russian Sign Language Tours of&nbsp;Spring Exhibitions</p>
<a class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__link" href="https://garagemca.org/ru/event/tours-in-russian-sign-language-of-new-exhibitions">Learn more</a></div>
<div class="ex-modal__content__row"><i class="info-bar__icon info-bar__mental info-bar__noCursor ex-modal__icon"></i>
<p class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__text--tableCell">Adapted guided tours of the exhibition Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene</p>
<a class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__link" href="https://garagemca.org/en/event/adapted-tours-of-the-exhibition-assuming-distance-speculations-fakes-and-predictions-in-the-age-of-the-coronacene">Learn more</a></div>
<p class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__footer">Garage Museum of&nbsp;Contemporary Art organizes regularly scheduled events for visitors with disabilities.&nbsp;<a class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__link ex-modal__content__inline" href="/en/visit/disabled_visitors?kind=blind">Learn more</a>.</p>

<p class="ex-modal__content__text">Individual Tours,&nbsp;Tours for Students and Schoolchildren, and a&nbsp;Day at Garage.You just need to choose the tour that's best for you.</p>
<p><a class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__link" href="/en/visit/tours">Learn more</a></p>

<i>Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene</i>

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<p class="text__lead">Every work in the exhibition is accompanied by two ideograms that help to form thematic connections between works, creating various semantic configurations. This arcade navigation element suggests a particular route or parkour through the key themes in the exhibition.</p>
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<p>This ideogram indicates an artist working with technology and media and with language in its broadest sense. You will find this icon next to many of the works in the exhibition. This is not surprising: we live in a highly organized technical world, and the development of language was a key stage in anthropogenesis.</p>
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<p>This is the second most popular ideogram in the exhibition. It marks works exploring health and medicine, various therapies (including alternative), and, in a broader sense, care.</p>
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<p>This category includes works focused on non-human agents, be it plants, insects, fish, birds, and dinosaurs, or avatars and artificial intelligence.</p>
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<p>This ideogram marks projects that are based on fakes, parafictions, and mystifications or devoted to conspiracy theories: from invented characters to fake medicine and from suspicions around 5G to the falsification of history.</p>
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<p>This is the birthplace of speculations. This category brings together works about money, the economy, services, and schemes&mdash;from the serious to the carnivalesque and from the possible to the utopian.</p>
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<p>This category features invented, speculative or imaginary memorials, archives, and museums.</p>
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Exhibition legend

<p style="text-align: left;"><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Medicine, code" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B8_1.jpg" alt="Medicine, code" width="1360" height="100" /></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Vitaly%20Barabanov%2C%20Maria%20Morina%2C%20Marina%20Karpova%2C%20and%20Katerina%20Sokolovskaya.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1062" /></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Marina Karpova, Maria Morina, and Katerina Sokolovskaya<br /><em>Simple Songs</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small" style="text-align: left;">Four-channel audio installation (30&rsquo;), sculptural group <br />(polystyrene foam, plastic, silicone, concrete), libretto Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p><em>Simple Songs</em> is the first joint work by three authors: Marina Karpova (music), Maria Morina (libretto), and Katerina Sokolovskaya (sculptural group). The installation, where visitors are invited to listen to an opera, consists of five tactile sculptures on which people can make themselves comfortable by sitting, lying, rocking, etc. The sculptures&rsquo; delicate colors and smooth surface create a temptingly relaxed environment, whereas the opera is a rather complex medium for perception. The starting point for the project was a reflection on several levels of communication: the work was realized in the space of music, where lies are impossible, and in the space of language, where consciousness needs to separate meaning from &ldquo;noise&rdquo; and recognize manipulation.</p>
<p>The libretto, which is performed by a soprano, a baritone, and a countertenor to the accompaniment of clarinet, flute, viola, and cello, is based on a documentary poetry text, created by editing quotations from found documents (the sources are listed on the back of the printed libretto). These include scientific articles and essays about COVID-19, official speeches by the President of Russia and his representatives, poetry by the head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin, and random messages on social networks about coronavirus and its treatment, vaccinations, conspiracy theories around the pandemic, the 75th anniversary of Victory Day, amendments to the Constitution, the physical and emotional labor of women, etc. The leitmotif for understanding this semantic collage composed of phrases taken out of context and often rendered meaningless is a quote from the President&rsquo;s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov: &ldquo;We can see that the process of improvement is consistently ongoing, the cementing process necessary for the full and irreversible strengthening of the state.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Overcoming aesthetic closedness thanks to the declared belonging of speech, the complexly structured subject of docupoetry accomplishes the ethical translation of the document- evidence by absorbing its discursive subjects into the orbit of its influence<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup>. It is symptomatic that the first docupoetry wave, brought about by the &ldquo;pressure of reality,&rdquo; occurred during the Great Depression in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. Today&rsquo;s historical analogue of the Great Depression is the year 2020, when <em>Simple Songs</em> was conceived and when, according to the authors, &ldquo;we faced something total,&rdquo; something that &ldquo;buzzed with the membranes of social networks, flooded with the smell of bleach in the stairwells, and adhered at the cellular level, bypassing consciousness.&rdquo; In an attempt to describe common experience, <em>Simple Songs</em> poetically transposes documentary evidence, which may in future form the material for a judicial inquiry.</p>
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<p class="p4" style="text-align: right;"><i>EL</i></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Vitaly Lekhtsier, &ldquo;Eksponirovanie i issledovanie, ili Chto proiskhodit s sub&rdquo;ektom v noveishei dokumental&rsquo;noi poezii: Mark Novak i drugie,&rdquo; Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2 (150), 2018.</p>

Marina Karpova, Maria Morina, and Katerina Sokolovskaya

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Non-human, code" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2018.png" alt="Non-human, code" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Vitaly%20Barabanov(1).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1033" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Vitaly Barabanov</strong><br /><strong>Unexpected Episode, 2020&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Natural pigments, acrylic, and natural fixatives on canvas, wood, plastic<br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>During the first Moscow lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vitaly Barabanov found himself in an unexpected situation. For several months he was unable to work in his studio. This circumstance played a decisive role in the creation of a new series of artworks, one of which is on view at the exhibition.</p>
<p>The series continues Barabanov&rsquo;s experiments with &ldquo;living&rdquo; work developed in collaboration with nature, which he launched with the projects <em>The Practice of Plen-air</em> (2016) and <em>Plastic Cultura</em> (2017). In these experiments he was attempting to enter into a certain relationship with nature, while bearing in mind Bruno Latour&rsquo;s ideas of a convocation of &ldquo;collectives,&rdquo; i.e., associations of human and non-human actors performing with the aim of democratic reassembly of the relationship between nature and society. In <em>The Practice of Plein-air</em>, for example, Barabanov painted the landscape and route of his walks by sitting on canvases or tying them to his leg, while the <em>Plastic Cultura</em> series of paintings is a result of filtering through the canvas water and pigments of three primary colors&mdash;red, yellow, and blue. The artist &ldquo;grew&rdquo; his new series in flowerpots, watering the canvases like soil with solutions of natural pigments and various fixatives. This process was interrupted by quarantine, which meant that the canvases gradually dried up over the course of several months, so that the final imagery formed in the absence of a human being, submitting to natural processes and the passage of time.</p>
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<p>The dark mirrored surface, in which the &ldquo;living&rdquo; canvas is reflected and seems to dissolve, appears here as a reference to the science fiction TV series <em>Black Mirror</em>, which Barabanov feels has become uncannily realistic in the situation of isolation and the transition online. The title of the series alludes to the ubiquitous presence of screens, and its episodes are united by the leitmotif of humanity&rsquo;s total subordination to technology. The colors and shapes of the painted image, created &ldquo;collectively&rdquo; in collaboration with non-human agents, are distorted by this contemporary version of the Claude glass, a device for observing natural scenes &ldquo;through a filter,&rdquo; which is named after master landscape painter Claude Lorrain and was designed to give a more &ldquo;cultured&rdquo; tone to excessively vital natural colors.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
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Vitaly Barabanov

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Medicine,secret" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%202.png" alt="Medicine,secret" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Alexander Shchurenkov</strong><br /><strong>From The Series <em>Stone-Cold</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">MDF, velvet<br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Alexander Shchurenkov&rsquo;s series <em>Stone-cold</em> brings together his early interest in crystals as mysterious natural forms, his teenage fascination with esoteric practices, and his current research focus on the contemporary obsession with psychic and physical &ldquo;enhancement&rdquo; using alternative medicine, including crystal healing.</p>
<p>More than any other unconventional therapy, crystal healing seems to have an air of mystery, created by the magnetism of the minerals themselves and their mystical promise of connection to the energy flows of nature and the cosmos, plus the many adepts among pop and media celebrities. Without falling for its promises, Alexander Shchurenkov is interested in the mechanisms on which crystal healing and similar practices are based, in particular the ambivalent placebo effect. In <em>The System of Objects</em>, Jean Baudrillard compares the placebo effect to the effect of advertising, which does not follow the &ldquo;logic of propositions and proofs, but a logic of fables and of the willingness to go along with them.&rdquo; It is not a pill that works, but the individual&rsquo;s belief in a system they can trust (&ldquo;the idea of medicine <em>plus</em> the presence of the physician&rdquo;). These systems and their contradictions are the object of Shchurenkov&rsquo;s investigations.</p>
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<p>Shchurenkov&rsquo;s relationship with the image of the crystal is also ambivalent, something which is reflected in the presentation of the works in the exhibition. Objects that look like gems are covered with velvet, similar to the kind used in the funeral business today. Studying the &ldquo;positive,&rdquo; therapeutic image of the crystal from a distance, he also picks up on its connection with the &ldquo;the other side,&rdquo; in particular associating the shape of crystals with tombstones. In the words of J.G. Ballard, crystals are &ldquo;neither living nor dead&rdquo; entities that exist beyond time.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
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Alexander Shchurenkov

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%205.png" alt="Secret, code" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Maxim Spivakov</strong><br /><strong><em>G Minor</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Metal tubes, mats, plasma screens,<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;<br /></span>three-channel video (10&rsquo; 13&rdquo;, 10&rsquo; 13&rdquo;, 2&rsquo; 2&rdquo;)<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;<br /></span>Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Constructed using scaffolding with three massive overlapping plasma screens installed on it, Maxim Spivakov&rsquo;s installation resembles sports equipment supplemented by the Suprematist planes of customized mats. It references bodily techniques that are also articulated through a musical performance, as noted in the title <em>G Minor</em> (the main minor key of Mozart). The subject of the artist&rsquo;s speculative exercise is the well-known conspiracy theory linking the spread of the COVID-19 virus to the 5G telecommunications network, which resulted a number of arson attacks against 5G towers in 2020. YouTube witness videos showing 5G towers on fire, &ldquo;authorized&rdquo; through camripping, are superimposed on a legally clean digital copy of Leon Theremin&rsquo;s archival film in which he plays the theremin, the instrument he invented. In this inaudible, contactless music, the fevered imagination sees the manipulations of the invisible agent responsible for the pandemic.</p>
<p>Even though this popular conspiracy theory seems to have been analyzed and diagnosed here, the artist is in no hurry to neutralize the charged fanaticism obsessed with &ldquo;offscreen&rdquo; will. On the contrary, he uses symmetrical manipulative gestures to enhance the incendiary pyropoetics that is zoomed by the sensory touch of the screens, removing the principle of image economy<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> he once proclaimed in order to expose the hidden mechanics of affect. The collision of two historical forms of technical imagination based on the action of electromagnetic waves (playing music with &ldquo;tamed&rdquo;&nbsp;electrical vibrations and using high-frequency signals for cellular communication) as if leaves in the air a noticeable smell of ozone, an extremely toxic and explosive modification of oxygen. Spivakov&rsquo;s essay &ldquo;Fire [ALV &ndash; 5G]&rdquo; connects the burning towers with images of the planetary &ldquo;fiery youth&rdquo; from Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov&rsquo;s work &ldquo;Cosmology of the Spirit.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup>The paradoxical logic of conservative resistance, which paves the way for new speeds (6G, 7G, etc.) through destruction, can be read in the spirit of the devastating &ldquo;wolf fire,&rdquo; opposed to the humanizing hearth, or &ldquo;the fire of the inferior ones&rdquo; in which the father of accelerationism, Nick Land, saw &ldquo;the apolitical element in war, literature, psychosis, and catastrophe.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">3</a></sup> Land&rsquo;s &ldquo;fire of the inferior ones&rdquo; and the minor key merge with the &ldquo;minoritarian&rdquo; of Gilles Deleuze: minorities that are innumerable, determined by the potential for becoming/creativity, and reveal a break with the abstract standard and power/domination of the constant majority.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Maxim Spivakov&rsquo;s exhibition 1/2 (2018) explored the problem of image, the practices of its negation, and modern-day iconoclasm. See: www.mmoma.ru/files/spiv_ctl.pdf</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Maxim Spivakov, &ldquo;Ogon&rsquo; [IVL &ndash; 5G],&rdquo; Sinii divan, 24, 2020, p. 178.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">3.</a>&nbsp;Nick Land, &ldquo;Spirit and Teeth,&rdquo; in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, edited by David Wood (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 48.</p>
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Maxim Spivakov

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Secret, museum" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%206.png" alt="Secret, museum" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong>MishMash group</strong><br /><strong><em>Construction Set for David Hume</em>, 2019&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">25 mixed media assemblages, metal, glass, tree branches, plinth <br />Plinth diameter: 518 cm<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p><em>Construction Set for David Hume</em> features twice in the exhibition. The first part is a multimedia installation that brings together 24 tower sculptures in a symbolic circle on a sacred gold base. Placed under glass domes as if in a cabinet of curiosities, these fragile towers, stoically presented by their creators for future transformation into ruins, in fact consist of random objects that have been piled on top of each other to become assemblages, referencing the mythological prototype of the Tower of Babel. Like any &ldquo;sublime&rdquo; object, they establish distance, both physical &mdash; protecting themselves from accidental intrusion with a hedge of bare branches&mdash;and intellectual&mdash;by eluding rapid comprehension and deciphering. Above the center of the gold circle is suspended an odd, completely inaccessible object. It is a <em>karmushka</em>, a play on the Russian word for feeder (<em>kormushka</em>) and karma.</p>
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<p>The installation is assembled from elements accumulated over a number of years and develops the tradition of hideoism, a movement discovered by the MishMash duo in 2018. Originating from the word &ldquo;hideous,&rdquo; as an aesthetic principle hideoism opposes designed, sterile beauty, rejecting pattern and canon in favor of the random, other, and different. Here, new meanings appear like grass growing through the asphalt, in the organics of the urban environment, which can be understood as &ldquo;the synergy of architect, climate, janitor, vandal, passer-by, incident, layering, and history.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In these unobvious, bizarre, and absurd combinations of the durable and the ephemeral, a new, exquisitely uncanny beauty is born: whimsical and ugly, nondescript and emotional, open to the inexplicability of the world beyond cause-and-effect relationships.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
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MishMash group

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Secret, code" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%205.png" alt="Secret, code" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Vladislav Kruchinsky</strong><br /><strong>The New State, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Three parts in rotation; UV print on polyester <br />292&times;1,172 cm each<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Vladislav Kruchinsky&rsquo;s series of drawings is presented like an unusual miniseries. Over the course of the exhibition, the large- scale multi-figured composition will change twice, offering viewers the opportunity to see three episodes of a story about the outbreak of an unknown &ldquo;state&rdquo; sweeping an unnamed Eastern European city. According to legend, the symptoms of this New State include nervous system disorders resulting in heightened perception of colors and smells along with mental changes that produce, in particular, a refusal to obey the authorities and an ability to self- organize that is unprecedented in modern times. The artist does not know the scenario of rapidly developing events in advance and responds to the current news using the speculative tradition of political caricature.</p>
<p>The reason for such a &ldquo;dynamic&rdquo; display is the unpredictable emergency we are witnessing today, caused by the pandemic, the constitutional change allowing nullification of presidential terms served, and other events that have knocked time out of kilter. The New State&rsquo;s through the looking glass world is marked by a carnival reversal of the familiar: people suffering from coronavirus lose their sense of smell, while those troubled by the New State become extremely sensitive to odors. Whereas the pandemic forces us to maintain distance from others, in the New State inhabitants &ldquo;clump together&rdquo; and, in an attempt to adapt to these new conditions, it is not shopping centers that are turned into hospitals but pharmacies that become community centers. Just like in children&rsquo;s <em>Wimmelbooks</em>, which feature richly detailed pictures and funny events, the well-known characters of Kruchinsky&rsquo;s universe appear in the fictional space of the city observed from above: the main protagonist is the young artist F.V. Paps (celebrating the tenth anniversary of his career this year), the familiar inhabitant of Free Koptevoland Gurgling Flesh, the symbol of the 2020 pandemic Running Ass, and some new heroes&mdash; scientists and doctors dressed in hazmat suits, pharmacists, art scene people, etc. What other disturbances the New State will visit on residents of the city and whether this totally absurd story will result in a catastrophe or a happy ending remain to be seen.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
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Vladislav Kruchinsky

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Code, museum" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%208.png" alt="Code, museum" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Nikita Seleznev</strong><br /><strong>Karate Poetry,&nbsp;2020&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Concrete, acrylic, found objects (hoodie, balaclava, ring, zip, armchair), metal, <br />3D print (biodegradable plastic), plasma screens, video (15&rsquo; 53&rdquo;, 4&rsquo; 48&rdquo;)<br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of&nbsp;the artist, MYTH Gallery (St. Petersburg), <br />Sergey Limonov, and Denis Khimilyayne</p>
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<p>Nikita Seleznev&rsquo;s works meet the highest standards of&nbsp;international multimedia art: boldly using any material, from found objects and images to&nbsp;words and video. Seleznev&rsquo;s approach to&nbsp;mass media imagery builds on&nbsp;the tradition associated with the Pictures Generation (Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo), who were first described as&nbsp;a&nbsp;unified artistic phenomenon by&nbsp;American critic and curator Douglas Crimp in&nbsp;the late 1970s. Today, Seleznev&rsquo;s &ldquo;allies&rdquo; in&nbsp;terms of&nbsp;aesthetics include important contemporary artists such as&nbsp;Jordan Wolfson (USA), Anna Uddenberg (Sweden), and Jose Dávila (Mexico).</p>
<p>In&nbsp;<em>A&nbsp;Voyage on&nbsp;the North Sea: Art in&nbsp;the Age of&nbsp;the Post-Medium Condition</em>, influential art theorist Rosalind Krauss ties the arrival of&nbsp;the new era to&nbsp;the figure of&nbsp;Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers, as&nbsp;Broodthaers rejected the idea of&nbsp;the specificity of&nbsp;medium and the distinction between unique and reproducible objects. &ldquo;The onset of&nbsp;higher orders of&nbsp;technology&mdash;robot, computer&mdash;allows us&nbsp;[. . .] to&nbsp;grasp the inner complexity of&nbsp;the mediums those techniques support, &rdquo; Krauss points&nbsp;out. However, Seleznev&rsquo;s practice, which can be&nbsp;described as&nbsp;the continuous translation of&nbsp;images from one &ldquo;state of&nbsp;matter&rdquo; to&nbsp;another, focuses not so&nbsp;much on&nbsp;the meticulous study of&nbsp;the medium of&nbsp;sculpture as&nbsp;on&nbsp;the process of&nbsp;translation itself.</p>
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<p>Seleznev&rsquo;s &ldquo;flaneur&rsquo;s perspective&rdquo; is&nbsp;similar to&nbsp;Baudelaire&rsquo;s, but with digital content in&nbsp;place of&nbsp;shop windows, galleries, and railroad stations. He&nbsp;sources his imagery from the Internet, picking out visual and communicative &ldquo;refrains&rdquo; from Instagram*, Facebook*, and Telegram. Photographs, posts, and comments that recur in&nbsp;online communities&mdash;lifestyle and street fashion channels, accounts of&nbsp;contemporary pop-culture figures like Billie Eilish or&nbsp;Tyler, the Creator&mdash;become prototypes for plastic form. Translated into the language of&nbsp;sculpture, they present themselves as&nbsp;archetypes. As&nbsp;in&nbsp;any translation, something inevitably gets lost, but Seleznev&rsquo;s aim is&nbsp;not to&nbsp;be&nbsp;faithful to&nbsp;the image or&nbsp;to&nbsp;quote the original. He&nbsp;wants to&nbsp;convey the authentic emotional tension associated with it&nbsp;and capture the sentiment with the utmost accuracy. Working with a&nbsp;new aesthetic canon, he&nbsp;explores youth culture with its focus on&nbsp;rebellion, sexuality, and aggression. Hence the elements of&nbsp;&ldquo;protest uniform&rdquo; in&nbsp;his semi-abstract sculptures: balaclavas, hoodies, headphones.</p>
<p>Karate poetry is&nbsp;a&nbsp;balanced image and a&nbsp;neologism that Seleznev has coined to&nbsp;describe the &ldquo;language&rdquo; spoken by&nbsp;Internet users. Their communication is&nbsp;based on&nbsp;short, striking messages and attraction. To&nbsp;some, karate is&nbsp;nothing but a&nbsp;series of&nbsp;punches, while to&nbsp;others it&rsquo;s a&nbsp;martial&nbsp;art. The same applies to&nbsp;poetry: pompous phrases in&nbsp;dusty corners to&nbsp;some, and pure transgression to&nbsp;others. Another impulse for the project is&nbsp;fan translations of&nbsp;popular songs, which are found on&nbsp;the Internet.</p>
<p>However, the zeitgeist keeps changing, and karate poetry will become history, just like skaldic poetry. For this reason, Seleznev&rsquo;s &ldquo;memorials&rdquo; are as&nbsp;photogenic, as&nbsp;perfectly designed as&nbsp;can be, and are made with reintegration into the Internet in&nbsp;mind.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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<p style="text-align: left;">&nbsp;*Facebook/Instagram is&nbsp;a&nbsp;social network banned in&nbsp;Russian which belongs to&nbsp;Meta, a&nbsp;company considered an&nbsp;extremist organization and banned on&nbsp;the territory of&nbsp;the Russian Federation.</p>
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Nikita Seleznev

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<p><strong>Chto Delat</strong><br /><strong>Six Kinetic Melodies for a Required Future, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Digital video (45&rsquo;), installation<br /> Dimensions variable<br /> Courtesy of the artists</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><strong>Artists&rsquo; collective:</strong> Olga Egorova (Tsaplya), Nina Gasteva, Nikolay Oleynikov, Dmitry Vilensky<br /> <strong>Film participants:</strong> Nastya Denisova, Sergey Finogin, Katya Ivanova, Elina Lebedze, Alexey Sergienko, Grusha Tsiolkovskogo</p>
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<p>The new video by Chto Delat, shot despite coronavirus and arrests, tells the story of a utopian laboratory in which the protagonists are simultaneously scientists and test subjects. While co-authoring the film, they experiment on themselves, aiming to develop new forms of automatic social behavior for survival in a rapidly changing world. The results of the work of the Laboratory of Stoppage, the Risk and Leisure Laboratory, the Anti-Helplessness Laboratory, the Trip Laboratory of Surplus Enthusiasm, the Laboratory of the Wandering Body, and the Laboratory of Applied Nausea will be of assistance to humanity in the near future. Each protagonist wears blue workers&rsquo; overalls, reminiscent of those of &ldquo;Dada mechanic&rdquo; John Heartfield, which were also worn in solidarity with industrial workers.</p>
<p>The action of the film takes place inside a three-dimensional structure made from cardboard, which simulates virtual communication via Zoom in the real space of the film set. Enclosed in individual capsules/windows resembling prison cells or spaceship compartments, the participants in the experiment suddenly open portals/gaps leading from one space to another, overcoming the alienation of remote communication by augmenting tactile and bodily interaction. In the exhibition space, the video is supplemented with an interactive installation: the virtual backgrounds featured in the film in the &ldquo;windows&rdquo; of the six protagonists turn out to be retractable curtains, behind which an &ldquo;exit&rdquo; into the surrounding reality is concealed, just like in Martha Rosler&rsquo;s series of anti-war collages <em>House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home</em>.</p>
<p>The original idea for the work, which was conceived in the summer of 2020, has undergone an unpredictable transformation in the rapidly changing reality of recent months; a transformation that Chto Delat members tried to reflect upon through the creation of an almost confessionally personal autobiographical film. The result of a collective effort, mutual discussions, and bodily practices, the scenario explores adaptation to a changing social and biological life. Importantly, this is not just about the pandemic, which forced people to &ldquo;glue&rdquo; themselves to screens or get used to carpal tunnel syndrome, but also about social, political, and environmental changes. The lever for imagining a new future becomes our reflexes, the basic form of the nervous system&rsquo;s activity, which brings us closer to the entire organic world and is responsible for the &ldquo;automatic&rdquo; part of human life. In the context of critique of reflexes and post-Pavlovian speculative science dealing with nature, there is discussion of conditioned reflexes: those which arise in reaction to adaptation to changing conditions and those anticipating the organism&rsquo;s future needs. The latter is a prediction of what will be required in a second, an hour or a year; an embodiment of how our brain constructs what psychophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein called &ldquo;a required future.&rdquo;</p>
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<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
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Chto Delat

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<p><strong>Genda Fluid</strong><br /><strong>Soul piercing Aura kissing Mind blowing, 2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">LED display, neon<br />Displays: 117&times;297&times;19 cm, 197&times;37&times;19 cm, neon: 70&times;200 cm <br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>In the imagination of the past 40 years, the primary setting for the embodiment of futurological projections has been a shimmering neo-noir East Asian megalopolis. Science fiction, and specifically cyber-punk, has been the conduit for this aesthetic since the 1980s, lighting up the already cinematic backstreets of Tokyo and Hong Kong with neon.</p>
<p>The new work by Genda Fluid could easily be a street in the type of city that we know from <em>Bladerunner</em> (1982) or <em>Akira</em> (1988). Performing, in the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky, &ldquo;a nocturne on a drainpipe flute,&rdquo; Genda Fluid has created a spatial poem about unearthly pleasures, assembled from neon and LED signs.</p>
<p>Her &ldquo;mental spa corner&rdquo; within the exhibition invites us to meditate on the experience economy and speculate about who could become a consumer of these new services. Who are these ethereal pleasures created for? Surely not for the protagonists of Brandon Cronenberg&rsquo;s turbo-consumerist dystopia <em>Antiviral</em> (2012), who buy celebrities&rsquo; viruses to get up close to their idols through illness. It&rsquo;s more likely that the artist has invented these wellness treatments for the captive computer programs from the science fiction film <em>Tron</em> (1982), which was an important reference point for the design of the exhibition.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>Soul Piercing, Aura Kissing, and Mind Blowing appear to be pleasures for the virtual reality natives, the &ldquo;ghosts in the shell,&rdquo; those who feel themselves a nymph rather than a machine and are ready to prefer &ldquo;metaphysical&rdquo; sex to the mechanical variety. For the old and the new subject, for whom poetry has been and remains a necessary expression of sensuality.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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<p><strong>APXIV</strong><br /><strong><em> ACCESSGOAT</em>, 2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Provider&rsquo;s lounge zone, model of a goat with a router, Wi-Fi network, <br />plasma screens, video (3&rsquo;, 9&rsquo; 39&rdquo;, 10&rsquo;) <br />360&times;360&times;100 cm<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
<p><em>ACCESSGOAT</em> is a continuation of the project <em>GOATHOTSPOT</em>, conceived by the APXIV group of young artists for the 1st Altai Biennale of Contemporary Art (2020), which takes place on the Uimon Steppe. Having received an invitation to participate in the Biennale, APXIV began looking into the availability of wireless Internet, an essential modern-day commodity, in this area of natural beauty. Their research resulted in a speculative startup: the group proposed the &ldquo;innovative&rdquo; idea of using Altai goats as new &ldquo;handy animals&rdquo; (Alexander Pschera) to create an extensive Wi-Fi network called Non-GMO LTE in the region.</p>
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<p><em>ACCESSGOAT</em> is the next stage of the startup&rsquo;s life cycle or, to be more precise, its commercial presentation, where provider aLTE invites potential customers to visit its phygital stand and take a look at the project&rsquo;s advertising materials. The lounge zone is crowned with the symbol of the startup, a model of a goat with a router on its horns, and the space features attractive elements of natural and technological environments. Designed as a hilly landscape covered with green grass and reminiscent of both picturesque Altai scenery and the classic Windows XP desktop wallpaper, the stand has built-in chargers and a dedicated aLTE Wi-Fi network. By connecting to the Internet via this network, visitors create a temporary group of active users and, in accordance with the artists&rsquo; concept, become active participants in the project (participatory ideas are typical of much of APXIV&rsquo;s work).</p>
<p>The fantasy proposed by APXIV can be embedded in the notion of &lsquo;&rsquo;transparent&rsquo;&rsquo; nature, as defined by author Alexander Pschera. He suggests that the interaction between humans and nature, in particular animals, will become more intense in the future with the help of technology, and that nature will take on the role of an &ldquo;embedded system&rdquo; in a digital civilization. In other words, nature will join the global technological landscape, or technoscape (Arjun Appadurai). Without making direct value judgments regarding such a scenario of the future, APXIV ironically tackles the essence of digital capitalism and the network society, reflecting on the extent to which ubiquitous access to the Internet is really necessary.</p>
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<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
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APXIV

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<p><strong>Ivan Sariy</strong><br /><strong><em> Abacus</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Wood, iron, revolving mechanism <br />56&times;100&times;50 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Since Mary Shelley&rsquo;s <em>Frankenstein</em>&mdash;a precursor to science fiction published at the beginning of the 19th century&mdash;revolutionary experiments for directing the human body, including the creation of new life, have become one of the genre&rsquo;s favourite themes. The further advancement of science (in particular, medicine and genetics) in the 20th century gave a new speculative impetus to the subject, which was spread widely by popular fiction and films. Often, these works examined the unpredictable consequences of such experiments, alongside the benefits they bring: stories of radical &ldquo;enhancement&rdquo; of the human body, the development of superpowers, and the extension of youth result in new forms of inequality, exploitation, and control.</p>
<p>Ivan Seriy&rsquo;s work lies in the territory of such dystopias. He posits that in the future humanity may develop a technology to extend life by a given number of years. This extremely popular service will, however, be very expensive and therefore accessible only to privileged groups. Seriy&rsquo;s kinetic sculpture <em>Abacus</em> is a symbol and artifact of such a world. A machine in the shape of a DNA double helix rotates, shifting wooden beads from side to side and summing up, with a monotonous sound, the amount of time the customer has left. Observing the COVID-19 pandemic, Seriy is concerned about a future in which access to the most advanced medical technology may become a luxury rather than a public good.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
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Ivan Sariy

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<p><strong>Zaur Tsugaev</strong><br /><strong><em>Mother&rsquo;s portrait</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Plastic, print, leather, plywood<br />Cards: 5.3&times;8.5 cm each; inlay: 35&times;29 cm <br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Since his first projects, Zaur Tsugaev&rsquo;s work has been connected to photography. His early artistic experiments include black- and-white impression shots of residents of Grozny (<em>One on One</em>, Contemporary Art Center, Grozny, 2014). His new work, a portrait of the artist&rsquo;s mother made from real bank cards featuring individual designs, is based on a 1960s photograph for a school wall of honor celebrating students&rsquo; accomplishments.</p>
<p>Ukrainian author and postcolonial thinker Oksana Zabuzhko, writing on the &ldquo;pre-Kodak era, the era of the Cold War and of Soviet photographic material, in fact, of everything Soviet&rdquo; in her novel <em>The Museum of Abandoned Secrets</em>, describes the faces of the time as &ldquo;caramel brown, speckled with the regular smallpox of the &lsquo;waffle&rsquo; raster that no Photoshop could cope with today. When scanned, these images lose their power, like poetry in translation.&rdquo; Bank algorithms could not cope either. Only after the artist&rsquo;s manipulations could the photograph be printed (the image had to be converted to black-and-white and dots added to enable the scanning of the background).</p>
<p>Contemporary artists address the banking system in various ways. Canadian-British conceptual artist Janice Kerbel, posing as an architecture student, staked out a London bank for a year and half. During this period she devised an elaborate scheme for a bank robbery and later exhibited it accompanied by floor plans and detailed descriptions of engineering systems and security posts (<em>Bank Job</em>, 1999). The Swedish artist duo Goldin+Senneby (Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby) found fame thanks to their project <em>Headless</em> (2007&ndash;2015), which linked modern financial markets, and in particular offshore zones, to the secret society founded by French philosopher Georges Bataille.</p>
<p>In <em>Mother&rsquo;s Portrait</em> Zaur Tsugaev raises the question of family economics and intergenerational care, and hints at the worries of many artists&rsquo; parents regarding their children&rsquo;s financial prospects. The fact that during the making of the work Tsugaev turned to Sberbank&mdash;an organization which embodies Russia&rsquo;s financial system&mdash;also leads us to consider that soon not only financial transactions but genetic ones could come under the control of corporations and the state.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>The signature on the bottom right card in <em>Portrait</em>, where the artist&rsquo;s signature would be on a painting, has been replaced with the name of &ldquo;the creator of the creator&rdquo; of the work, Zaur Tsugaev&rsquo;s mother.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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Zaur Tsugaev

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<p><strong>Anna Fobia</strong><br /><strong><em>HAPPINESS</em>, from the project <em>ULTRAVIOLENCE</em>, 2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Beer carton, plywood, laser and router carving, UV print, paint <br />74.5&times;164&times;47.5 cm</p>
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<p><strong><em>FAITH</em>, from the project <em>ULTRAVIOLENCE</em>, 2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Beer carton, plywood, laser and router carving, UV print, paint <br />72&times;150&times;47.5 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Token money translates the measure of the value of things and naturalizes our idea of the state. Anna Fobia deconstructs the design of notes issued by the Bank of Russia and the ideological precepts encoded in them. Her collages composed of graphic elements from post-Soviet banknotes present utopian&mdash;or for some people, perhaps, dystopian&mdash;landscapes.</p>
<p><em>FAITH</em> features a phallocentric skyline, a cityscape that symbolically represents the unshakeable power- and authority-oriented hierarchies of Russian society. The urban panorama is composed of powerful verticals rising into the sky: a launch vehicle, storm waves, fortress towers, and the belfries and cupolas of Orthodox churches.</p>
<p>In <em>HAPPINESS</em>, the artist envisages banknotes as pages from a botanical atlas and brings together images of nature from the European and Asian parts of Russia. In his novel Oblivion, Sergei Lebedev, an important contemporary Russian prose writer whose work explores memory, history, and state crimes of the past, describes the Eurasian border as follows: &ldquo;[...] on the European slope, only the polar birch grows, low and twisted by the winds, while on the Asian side there are cedars, tall, powerful, their roots breaking stone.&rdquo; It is a place where &ldquo;Europe&rsquo;s life force weakens, where it is only enough for reindeer moss and lichen while the thick Asian forest and grass threaten to overflow the crest.&rdquo; Anna Fobia&rsquo;s landscape is impossible (it has, among other things, natural competitors such as the birch and the fir peacefully growing side by side) and hints at the illusory character and inadequacy of Eurasianism and its contemporary incarnations, the main visual expression of which in contemporary Russia is the far-right propagandistic décor of the artist Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt.</p>
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<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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Anna Fobia 

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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Maxim%20Trulov%20and%20Ksyusha%20Lastochka.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1077" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Maxim Trulov and Ksyusha Lastochka</strong><br /><strong>CURE-ALL, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Wood, acrylic, lamps, paper, twine<br />Van: 240&times;160&times;310 cm, figure: 170&times;50&times;140 cm <br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p>Nizhny-Novgorod-based street artist duo Maxim Trulov and Ksyusha Lastochka are best known for their black-and-white cut- outs, murals, and ceramics. Like comic books, their works tell stories of imaginary worlds populated with knights, Vikings, giants, skateboarders, and fantastical creatures. In these vaguely familiar images, largely borrowed from western mass culture, there are memories of the scare stories and urban legends of 1990s Russia, such as tales about three-headed fish and other mutants living in the sewers.</p>
<p>During the spring months of the pandemic, Trulov and Lastochka occupied themselves with the development of a new universe, the inhabitants of which had been forced to move into individual wheeled homes. Due to the pressure of epidemiological regulations, cities turned into car parks, with trailer schools, trailer cafés, and trailer noodle shops. Their artistic forecast was partly correct: during Russia&rsquo;s hybrid quarantine in fall, many people realized that a private car was a sanitary stronghold. The work featured in the exhibition presents a new development of this phantasmagoria: a mysterious food truck has appeared in Trulov and Lastochka&rsquo;s universe, selling paper that cures all ills and creating a black market for bottles of this &ldquo;medicine.&rdquo; The meaning of the &ldquo;message in a bottle&rdquo; is simple: the cure-all paper points to the fact that health and longevity are directly connected to the ability to pay.</p>
<p>The prophetic power of jest in Trulov and Lastochka&rsquo;s work brings to mind philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin&rsquo;s studies on the culture of popular laughter, only the &ldquo;rites and shows&rdquo; of the Middle Ages and &ldquo;town squares filled with laughing people&rdquo; have been replaced by contemporary art in museums and galleries. This art can transport the viewer into the world of carnival and utopia, temporarily liberating them from everyday life and the power of authoritarian social institutions. Another recent work by the duo imbued with &ldquo;an understanding of the joyful relativity of the dominating truths and powers&rdquo; is <em>Liberty Will Never Perish</em> (2020), the title of which is borrowed from Charlie Chaplin&rsquo;s final speech in <em>The Great Dictator</em> (1940). Interestingly, <em>The Great Dictator</em> was released in the same year Bakhtin published the first edition of his book <em>Rabelais and His World</em>.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>Trulov and Lastochka&rsquo;s trailer-dystopia enters in a curious relationship with another work in the exhibition, Khochesh Group&rsquo;s mockumentary about the garage city of Tuapse.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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Maxim Trulov and Ksyusha Lastochka

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<p><strong>Andrey Guryanov and Anton Kuryshev </strong><br /><strong>&ldquo;No message&rdquo; message. 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Sound installation<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p>Andrey Guryanov and Anton Kuryshev&rsquo;s sound installation is an intervention in the Museum&rsquo;s audio notification system. From time to time, a signal can be heard in the East Gallery. It&rsquo;s similar to the one that precedes an audio announcement but is not followed by any announcement. Like the conspiracy theories around the twenty-fifth frame in film and television, a signal without a message seems to speculate with visitors&rsquo; attention, or even secretly affect their psyche. What is the artwork here? Is it the signal or the silence that follows it? Perhaps, with a properly tuned mindset, the visitor can perceive the pause between the two repetitive signals, in the spirit of John Cage&rsquo;s famous work 4&rsquo;33&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Guryanov and Kuryshev&rsquo;s previous joint sound works emphasized the site-specificity of place. <em>Reminder</em> (2016) at Moscow&rsquo;s Stanislavsky Electrotheatre featured sounds recorded in the foyer and reproduced, like an echo, in the same space in a random order, filling the current moment with the ghosts of the past. In <em>GOST 111-35</em> (2018), prepared speakers made the glazing of the ZIL Palace of Culture&rsquo;s winter garden (designed by avant- garde architects the Vesnin brothers) resonate, rattle, and tinkle. Alternatively, the signal without a message transforms Garage into what contemporary anthropology defines as &ldquo;nonplace&rdquo; (a term coined by Marc Augé), the meaningless&mdash;other than for purely utilitarian needs&mdash;transit space of hypermodernism, like a shopping center, airport or subway. In such nonplaces, the visual and acoustic ecology is permanently disrupted by the intrusion of unnecessary messages, the number of which has increased many times over the past year due to sanitary warnings. All of this is not helpful for our mental health, but Guryanov and Kuryshev&rsquo;s &ldquo;alarming&rdquo; sonic readymade is intended to produce a healing effect. By consciously noting our own reaction to the warning signal, we can try to overcome its automatism, realize the violence of the readiness/frustration imposed on us, and place a barrier before it within our internal audio landscape.</p>
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<p>Why is this sound work, which stitches through the entire exhibition space, localized here? The thing is, the first encounter with it should not be pre-arranged. Only later will visitors (rarely interpreted as listeners) discover that they came across an artwork.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
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Andrey Guryanov and Anton Kuryshev

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Secret, museum" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%206.png" alt="Secret, museum" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Khochesh group </strong><br /><strong>Garage City, 2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Video, 12&rsquo; 8&rdquo;<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p>Made according to the rules of documentary filmmaking on the subject of architecture, <em>Garage City</em> tells an incredible story, the beginning of which dates back to the Soviet 1920s and the end of which looks into the future. The script is based around the creative path of our contemporary, the architect Marina Krifaridi, and the heritage of the &ldquo;Tuapse avant-garde&rdquo; that fed her practice. The Tuapse avant-garde comprised a radical synthesis of Georgy Krutikov&rsquo;s <em>Flying City</em> project (1928) and Mikhail Okhitovich&rsquo;s concept of disurbanism, which was inspired by advancements in transportation (1929&ndash;1930). Embracing both ideas, VKhUTEMAS students Elena Dostova and Irina Mogilnaya, who were taught by Krutikov, came up with designs for flying house-garages: living cells that could float freely in the air and move through space. Way ahead of its time, the utopian project of the garage city Tuapse was not implemented. However, it found a new life in the 1960s, with the development of the automotive industry, which boosted the spontaneous growth of garage cooperatives. Marina Krifaridi transformed garages into dance clubs and bars, cafés, restaurants, and hotels. Forced to go into hiding in the aftermath of the repressions that followed Garage Riot of 1968, the architect resumed her practice in the 1990s, when individual garage construction swept through Tuapse. Much in demand among the new Russia&rsquo;s private clientele, Krifaridi founded an architectural school of extreme urbanism, which, faced with new environmental challenges, created another revolution by turning Tuapse into a garden city where trees grew on garages and greenhouses were installed on them.</p>
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<p>The story of the architect, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1999, is narrated by guest experts, architects, and critics, and features historical documents and photographs, blueprints and 3D-render. Originally recorded in English and dubbed in the manner of underground translation, it sounds entirely plausible, especially as Krutikov&rsquo;s seemingly fantastical projects actually existed. Nevertheless, after a while the viewer finds themselves immersed in a space of fiction, or what Carrie Lambert-Beatty has called parafiction: &ldquo;Unlike historical fiction&rsquo;s fact-based but imagined worlds, in parafiction real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> The film by Khochesh Group connects the &ldquo;real&rdquo; folk architecture of the Russian South with the &ldquo;real&rdquo; utopian architecture of the avant- garde era, ingeniously inscribing fictional female architects into historical and architectural narratives&mdash;from 1920s modernism to 1960s neo-modernism, present-day gentrification and eco-friendly architecture&mdash;deftly forming the plot around garage mythology, which finds a new context at Garage.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Carrie Lambert-Beatty, &ldquo;Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,&rdquo; October, 129, Summer 2009, p. 54.</p>
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Khochesh group

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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Daria%20Pravda_(1).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1066" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Daria Pravda</strong><br /><strong> The Electrical body, 2018&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Installation<br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Museum audiences of the first decades of the 21st century were introduced to esotericism in art by the western art establishment. In the mid 2000s, curator Daniel Birnbaum (former director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm) presented Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint as a predecessor of abstractionism, spurring a series of successful exhibitions of the artist around the world, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2013, blackboards by the founder of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner with illustrations to his seminars and the Thoth tarot deck by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris made up an important part of <em>The Encyclopedic Palace</em>, the central exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni.</p>
<p>Daria Pravda presents her own speculation on the esoteric. It does not reveal any &ldquo;unknown pages&rdquo; in the history of art but does offer a carefully crafted mystification focused on the activities of a secret society called Torus.</p>
<p>Pravda&rsquo;s quasi-retro-futuristic installation with elements of steampunk tells a story that is supposedly set in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century. The fin de siècle was a period of technical progress, particularly in the use of electrical current, and also saw a large number of Russian intellectuals drawn to occultism. This was a time when spiritualists, anthroposophists, theosophists, freemasons, Tarot readers, anarcho-mystics, and healers set the cultural (and sometimes the political) agenda.</p>
<p>The protagonist of Pravda&rsquo;s mystification, Torus founder and medium Elizaveta Dmitrievna Pribytkova, developed a special psychic technique, the result of which was understood as an awareness of a person&rsquo;s own electromagnetic field and the ability to feel its lines of force in the form of a toroid. Later, members of the secret society traveled to the Arctic, where they vanished in the solar wind. Their disappearance without trace defied the laws of physics and could be interpreted as a breakthrough toward the singularity.</p>
<p>The shape of the electrical body resembles the structure of our world: both the Earth and the Sun have toroidal magnetospheres. Pribytkova&rsquo;s aimed to discover and understand external parallels to internal experiences. Today, her search could be helped by psychoanalysis. The torus is one of the shapes that Jacques Lacan analyzes in his works on topology. The topology of the torus illustrates certain features of the structure of the subject. In the same way that in a torus its center of gravity falls outside its volume, so the center of the subject is located outside it; like the torus, the subject is de-centered, ex-centric. The central and the peripheral external sides of the torus are parts of an uninterrupted surface. These features illustrate the way in which psychoanalysis problematizes the difference between the &ldquo;internal&rdquo; and the &ldquo;external&rdquo;.</p>
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<p>Pravda&rsquo;s method (and her surname, which translates as &ldquo;truth&rdquo;) brings to mind the title of the autobiography of a key representative of the Leningrad underground art scene, Timur Novikov: <em>Lie Only the Truth!</em> However, her way of using invented characters to tell the story gravitates toward Moscow conceptualism and in particular resembles Elena Elagina&rsquo;s <em>Laboratory of Great Undertaking</em> (1996), another example of the use of a female character to symbolize a utopian quest. In <em>Laboratory</em>, successful futurologist Olga Lepeshinskaya conducts scientific experiments in an attempt to extend the life of Soviet people.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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Daria Pravda

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Medicine, code" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%201.png" alt="Medicine, code" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong><strong><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Mikhail%20Maksimov_(1).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1145" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Mikhail Maksimov </strong><br /><strong><em>Flatality</em>, 2021</strong><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: 'AGBookPro',serif;"><br /></span>Three-channel video installation <br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Mikhail Maksimov&rsquo;s new work is consonant with the word &ldquo;fatality,&rdquo; which stands for the final stage of finishing off the enemy, different for each character, in the fighting game <em>Mortal Kombat. Flatality</em> explores various disturbances in the perception of space and refers to spatial experiences invoked by the pandemic. During lockdown, for most people the world narrowed to the size of a room, meaning distance&mdash;from home to the local store and from person to person&mdash;began to play a decisive role in their lives. By developing the principle of modeling potential realities, Flatality addresses modification of the world via physical experience: according to the artist, &ldquo;a change in one coordinate in space alters the order of creating a narrative. If we make ourselves a home in a pipe, we will have to create linear works forever.&rdquo; Within the coordinates of the altered, &ldquo;layering&rdquo; consciousness, the artist develops a new type of narrative, a &ldquo;distance drama&rdquo; in which the action unfolds not in time but in distance. He also expands the space-time boundaries of the medium, which is based on the flow of time (of the author and the viewer) and is created in the virtual space and presented in the real one. Around ten short videos combine to create three sequences of approximately 36 minutes each, asynchronized with each other. These video sequences are constantly diverging in the installation space, creating an endless set of combinations like generative art, thus undermining the usual canon of runtime as the main measure of time-based art and making use of the characteristics of the space.</p>
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<p>The vocalized direct speech reproduces patients&rsquo; evidence about pathological sensations of space connected with a loss of volume, a flattening of the visible picture due to derealization or with the loss of proprioceptive perception in patients with Kandinsky-Clérambault syndrome. The almost incomprehensible, incoherently delusional descriptions of internal states are voiced by speech synthesizers and acquire a detachedly artistic character: &ldquo;moveshki&rdquo; and &ldquo;Frankogols&rdquo; make themselves at home in the recognizable psychedelic style of Maksimov&rsquo;s 3D animation. The artist finds a visual and spatial correspondence with the syndromes listed,<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> using a &ldquo;self-written space flattener&rdquo; as a plug- in for a 3D program for creating virtual landscapes. <em>Flatality</em> plunges the viewer into the speech haze of individual psychopathologies, while also performing as a cartography of Russian landscapes, from the Kola Peninsula to Tuva. A series of alternating panoramas of flattened spaces grows from an individual&rsquo;s inner experience into a diagnostic assessment of the unsettled condition and problematic nature of existence in the diversity of the country&rsquo;s spaces. According to the artist, the subjective &ldquo;inconvenience inside one&rsquo;s head&rdquo; can be read as an objective &ldquo;inconvenience inside the country,&rdquo; even though we understand that &ldquo;illness is a personal matter and only health loves to be together.&rdquo;</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="&quot;_ftn1&raquo;">1.</a>&nbsp;Along with derealization and Kandinsky-Clérambault syndrome, the work uses descriptions of schizophasia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, oneiroid syndrome, and the loss of the sense of numeration.</p>
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Mikhail Maksimov

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Secret, museum" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%206.png" alt="Secret, museum" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_MishMash_.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1030" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>MishMash group</strong><br /><strong><em>Construction Set for David Hume</em>, 2019&ndash;2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Series of 24 drawing<br />Watercolor and ink on paper<br />29.7&times;21 cm each<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p>Part two of <em>Construction Set for David Hume</em> comprises a series of 24 watercolor portraits of the towers seen by visitors in the installation. Executed like drawings in an anatomical atlas, they seem to explain what the towers are made of, while also revealing to the viewer the life and work of the MishMash duo. These minor objects and rarities, preserved as keepsakes out of pity or for future use, are elements of previous artworks, their ecological upcycling turning the principle of benefit inside out: they came in handy after they became works of art, having forever departed the utilitarian world. With the help of a name generator, these absurd combinations acquired titles reminiscent of the Moscow conceptualist tradition, such as <em>Awkward Uprising, Vile Scheme, and Accomplice of Delusions</em>. The portraits&rsquo; dubious status&mdash;are they preliminary sketches for the tower sculptures or subsequent documentation thereof&mdash;and their expositional distance from the installation create a spatiotemporal tension.</p>
<p>One of the keys to understanding the artists&rsquo; concept is the philosophy of David Hume, which almost destroyed philosophy as such. A consistent empiricist, Hume believed that nothing can be cognized through experience and observation, since the sequence of phenomena does not reveal a connection accessible to our observation abilities, and only previous experience and habit inform our imagination regarding cause-and-effect relationships between things. According to the artists, &ldquo;all the mental constructions that we humans produce involve the selection of elements and their adjustment to each other&mdash;our erudition, education, hormonal balance, experience, what we ate for dinner, how much we slept, the book we read, our Facebook friends, secret desires, etc. We are piling elements one on top of another to try to build a picture of the world, just as previously we used to put an elephant on top of a turtle with the same purpose.&rdquo; Observations of last year&rsquo;s events have shown how little our assumptions about reality really mean, and how our forecasts for the future are accidental because they are based, as Hume had it, on the habit of conceiving the future through thoughts arising from the past.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
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<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Code, non-human" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2010.png" alt="Code, non-human" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Kirill%20Savchenkov(4).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1066" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Kirill Savchenkov</strong><br /><strong><em>Flat tiger, Paper node, Dead hand, and Tightened knot</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Four-channel sound system, tin, lead, steel cable, tears of T-1000, <br />aluminum, copper, steel wire, plastic, rubber, cellophane, nylon, bone, <br />plants, cotton, engraving, laser pointer<br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>Dystopias that describe clashes between humanity and autonomous machines are often based on questions about what the machines would be like, who created them, and how any war would be waged. Unable to conceive the essence and the actions of these radically different creatures, both fiction and scientific research depict them through comparison with the intelligible: the laws of nature, human or animal organisms, and observed modes of social relationships. Failing to see their bodies, they track what artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl called the already existing &ldquo;shadows&rdquo; of these machines. Kirill Savchenkov&rsquo;s practice explores the emergence of such shadows in the media, politics, power structures, and military systems, particularly within models of informational autocracies. <em>Flat Tiger, Paper Node, Dead Hand, and Tightened Knot</em> examines how conflicts take place in the age of digital media and models a situation in which one such conflict has suddenly run out of human control.</p>
<p>This type of dystopia is described in Harlan Ellison&rsquo;s 1967 science fiction short story <em>I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream</em>, which is set on Earth after the Third World War, a conflict delegated to super computers. Having developed independent intelligence, they have merged into a single entity and exterminated all of humanity other than five individuals who are kept captive, their minds and bodies controlled. Savchenkov sees in today&rsquo;s technological and social developments the possibility of such a scenario.</p>
<p>The blurring of the boundaries between public and private in a highly digitized society has created the conditions for the weaponization of the media, which Savchenkov understands as the development of hybrid warfare in the digital space, where everyone is both a viewer and a participant in the conflict and the difference between war and peace has dissolved. The strategy of this type of war involves the production of psychological wounds (the result of which may be depression, anxiety or stress) through hidden content manipulation. According to philosopher Catherine Malabou, in humans this type of non-physical wound causes frustration and indifference, lowering their ability to resist. In informational autocracies such hybrid methods can be used as instruments of political repression. What happens if the waging of this war is delegated to artificial intelligence? What would a crash in the control system create?</p>
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<p>Savchenkov&rsquo;s installation presents the results of such a situation in the form of a poetic polylogue between participants and witnesses: the shadow of artificial intelligence, the ghost of its operator, and the body of a witness that has blown herself up. The only independent element that can hinder the final victory of the machine is the weather, the most chaotic and uncontrollable component in the world.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>A forecast is not an explanation.</p>
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Kirill Savchenkov

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Market, medicine" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2014.png" alt="Market, medicine" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Kafe-Morozhenoe%20media%20activist%20collective.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1116" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Media activist collective Kafe-Morozhenoe and a working group</strong><br /><strong><em>Radical Reveries</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Self-adhesive film, latex print, matte lamination <br />140&times;732 сm<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><strong>Working group:</strong> Dmitry Bezuglov, Ilya Budraitskis, Angelina Burliuk, Maria Dmitrieva, Elena Ishchenko, Nikolay Spesivtsev, Ilona Voytkovskaya, Dina Zhuk<br /> <strong>Designer:</strong> Ulyana Bychenkova</p>
<p>The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken many established institutions, including contemporary art, and revealed their fragility. Cancelled and suspended projects, financial losses, and job cuts have triggered a new wave of discussions within the art community about contemporary art&rsquo;s sore spots and reactivated local activist initiatives. One of the most remarkable of these initiatives, focused on labor policies, is Art Workers Italia (AWI), launched in response to the crisis in Italy. Although its actions tackled the local situation, AWI&rsquo;s research and activist agenda is addressed to the international community.</p>
<p>The media activist group Kafe-Morozhenoe, which was formed in March 2020, studies similar issues in Russia. Acting as &ldquo;willful subjects&rdquo; (Sara Ahmed), group founders Nastya Dmitrievskaya and Daria Iuriichuk do not only look for system errors but, faithful to the motto &ldquo;don&rsquo;t look over it: don&rsquo;t get over it,&rdquo; try to bring them to public attention using a broad range of communication tools, including their own Telegram channel. Kafe-Morozhenoe does not operate alone. Nastya and Daria are involved in heated discussions with colleagues from other cities and countries (including AWI), engage likeminded artists in collective projects, and address existing practices. <em>Radical Reveries</em> is part of broader collective&rsquo;s research focused on the system of resource distribution and the way it influences the functioning of contemporary art in Russia. In particular, Kare-Morozhenoe is interested in the interlinkages between the politics of redistribution and recognition, as described by philosopher Nancy Fraser. According to Fraser, any fair system has to satisfy two conditions: first, all participants must have sufficient resources to allow them to speak independently, and second, institutional models must ensure equal respect and social esteem for everyone. Having selected collective analytical and speculative mapping of the workspace of Russian contemporary art as their method for the project, Nastya and Daria organized a series of discussions (&ldquo;laboratories&rdquo;) with creative workers, aiming to draw a collective (and long-needed) map of problematic topics. Another goal of the project, as reflected in its title, was prognostic, or speculative: having outlined the issues, participants allowed themselves to &ldquo;disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places&rdquo; (Sara Ahmed) and created a kaleidoscope of projective ideas, from political utopias to concrete practical suggestions. Artist Ulyana Bychenkova has depicted the prototypes of these reveries and discontents resulting from the discussions as rhizomatic diagrams that are presented as part of the exhibition and have been issued as a zine. The findings of the &ldquo;laboratories&rdquo; will also form the basis of public discussions that will take place during the exhibition.</p>
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<p>Without doubt, <em>Radical Reveries</em> is a selective &ldquo;field research&rdquo; and, to a certain degree, an exercise in imagination for creative workers. At the same time, the maps created by Kafe-Morozhenoe and a working group are addressed to the viewer&mdash;a key participant in the system of contemporary art&mdash;who is invited to study the suggested routes and imagine alternative ones.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
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Media activist collective Kafe-Morozhenoe and a working group

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Code, non-human" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2010.png" alt="Code, non-human" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_ShShSh%20self-organized%20group(2).jpg" alt="" width="1084" height="1600" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>ShShSh self-organized group</strong><br /><strong><em>I DO understand you, but I CANNOT SPEAK</em>, 2020&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">VR game, plasma screens, engraved acrylic glass, epoxy floor <br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p>With over 30 female artists as its members, the self-organized group ShShSh describes itself as a non-hierarchical multitude of independent units. Each member has their own personal mythology and working strategy, but together they form a single collective body, operating via chaotic horizontal connections. An important part of their practice is the study of the mechanics of the group&rsquo;s internal interactions, including in the digital space. In <em>Body Horror Performance</em> (2020) the artists created a changeable &ldquo;new monster&rdquo; by mixing audio and video materials during a Zoom meeting, inspired by Dr. Frankenstein&rsquo;s experiments. Following a similar procedure, in their desktop jam <em>Vulnerability/Sustainability/ Now</em> (2020), they indulged in collective therapeutic meditations on limitations and transformations during lockdown.</p>
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<p>In <em>I DO Understand You, But I CANNOT SPEAK</em>, ShShSh&rsquo;s experiments in virtual interactions and discovering their current digital identities enter a new stage: from performative Zoom meetings they move on to the temporality of the communal life of their avatars within a single digital house. The house is designed as a safe communal space, well-suited to the participants&rsquo; reflexive study of their own practices, a kind of digital homage to Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro&rsquo;s Womanhouse. The appearance and traits of each character reflect their creator&rsquo;s interests. The &ldquo;werewolf&rdquo; of Viktoria Chupakhina, who researches human-animal interactions from a posthumanist perspective, is a human-dog hybrid; Tatyana Sherstyuk&rsquo;s &ldquo;fluffy cookie&rdquo; turns into an &ldquo;angry god,&rdquo; pointing to the deceptive nature of appearances, as in Sherstyuk&rsquo;s other projects; the &ldquo;dark matter&rdquo; of Sasha Puchkova deforms the space around it, and, like the artist herself, works with the poetics of automatic writing.</p>
<p>Viewers are invited to observe this experiment in avatars&rsquo; communal living on plasma screens or using VR headsets, but with certain conditions (they cannot enter the house), which creates an interdependent system of relationships between the observer and the observed. The private routines inside the house are open to the external gaze, but even when viewers enter the virtual world with a VR headset, for the inhabitants they are no more than random passers-by.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
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ShShSh self-organized group

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Code, non-human" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2010.png" alt="Code, non-human" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Boris Shershenkov</strong><br /><strong><em>Camera Infinita</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Acrylic, metal, electronics Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><strong> Programming:</strong> Polina Shershenkova</p>
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<p>With <em>Camera Infinita</em> Boris Shershenkov continues to explore the application of scientific methodology (borrowed from biochemistry, microbiology, ecology, and bioacoustics) to the study of technological environments. In this work he looks into the formation of new digital &ldquo;organisms&rdquo; following the idea of primordial soup, a hypothesis that explains the emergence of organic life with an accidental synthesis of elements in a dense and active environment. Shershenkov sees Internet, and in particular its most active zones such as Twitter that constantly generates new content and accumulates large volumes of data as the primordial soup of technological reality. Shershenkov believes that interactions within such masses of accumulated data may follow patterns similar to biochemical ones, which could lead to the emergence of digital life forms. He sees the possibility of such an outcome in the speculative similarities between the evolution of nature and technology. For example, according to Shershenkov, the switch from mechanical machines to electronic ones could be likened to the emergence of organic matter from non-organic, while computerization, the invention of cybernetics and robotics, the Internet of Things, and artificial neural networks may be comparable to the development of separate molecules into protoorganisms.</p>
<p><em>Camera Infinita</em> is a space for observation of the &ldquo;primordial soup&rdquo; fragment&mdash;local trends on Twitter&mdash; with the use of a special device. The device contains a version of the oldest optical instrument for the study of the world, the camera obscura, through which a constantly changing data forms moving light patterns. However, the speed of data development is too fast for the human eye to register, so the visual is complemented with sonic &ldquo;observation,&rdquo; allowing the ear to distinguish between the rapidly changing events. For Shershenkov, the camera obscura is an important invention that, for its time, was more than a mere technical device. It was part of the system of the organization of knowledge and of the observer. By placing the spectator within the isolated sound space of the hexagonal <em>Camera Infinita</em>, Shershenkov aims to recreate the image of &ldquo;the first observer,&rdquo; who has come across a radically new way of experiencing everyday reality and of forming knowledge about the unknown. This experience is similar to that of the first users of the camera obscura, the &ldquo;free-floating inhabitant[s] of the darkness, marginal supplementary presence[s] independent of the machinery of representation,&rdquo; in the words of art critic Jonathan Crary.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
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Boris Shershenkov

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Non-human, code" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2018.png" alt="Non-human, code" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Alisa%20Smorodina%20and%20Alyona%20Shapovalova(1).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1073" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Alyona Shapovalova and Alisa Smorodina</strong><br /><strong><em>TAD.I</em> (Testing the Ability to Deanthropocentralize. Insect), 2021<br /></strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Brochures with test assignments, nine desk and chair sets, plexiglass shields, disinfection lamp, <br />UV-protection glasses, black boxes, Petri dishes, clear and tinted glass jars, honey, <br />ethanol, formic acid, empty praying mantis oothecas, empty wasp nests, galls, test tubes and holders, ballpoint pens<br />Dimensions variable <br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p><em>TAD.I</em> by Alyona Shapovalova and Alisa Smorodina explores non-human agents, a subject of key interest within the global context. Exhibition visitors are invited to undergo a test for deanthropocentralization; to temporarily abandon the idea of their species&rsquo; superiority as the pinnacle of evolution and take on the role of an insect, thereby experiencing the uniqueness of the diverse &ldquo;talents&rdquo; nature has awarded to every living being. Today, posthumanism proposes a radically new ethics. Whereas previously the loss of human appearance&mdash;from &ldquo;punishment&rdquo; through reincarnation as animals in Eastern religions to the terrible &ldquo;transformation&rdquo; into an insect in Kafka&rsquo;s novella&mdash;now the ecological disaster caused by the Anthropocene demands we consider how forests think or how the Internet of animals functions.</p>
<p>The test developed by the artists suggests imagining oneself as a weaver ant, wasp, or male bug and finding a solution to the problem, trying to hear what dangers lie in wait for praying mantises or termites while also discovering abilities inaccessible to humans. Shapovalova and Smorodina believe that principles such as eusociality in social insects could become &ldquo;donors&rdquo; for the reorganization of our social structure, but in order to perceive the living experience of other creatures humans need to avoid anthropocentric thinking. As writer Paul B. Preciado put it, &ldquo;just as the virus mutates, if we want to resist submission, we must also mutate.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Anyone taking the test may wonder whether the compilers are not too &ldquo;human&rdquo; to be regarded as experts in deanthropocentralization? Is the famous left intellectual maxim &ldquo;do not speak up for the oppressed, but let them speak for themselves&rdquo; relevant to non-human agents? To what extent is the classroom discipline proposed by the artists, which mimics the procedures for language tests like TOEFL or IELTS, compatible with questioning our humanness? In order to conduct speculative testing <em>TAD.I</em> ironically reproduces the work of tools of migration and bureaucratic control, but the target of its criticism may also be the principles of participatory art, which art historian Claire Bishop termed the &ldquo;artificial hells&rdquo; of contemporary museums.</p>
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<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
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Alyona Shapovalova and Alisa Smorodina

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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Asya%20Volodina(1).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1063" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Asya Volodina</strong><br /><strong><em>Venice of Fish</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Wood, metal, textile, Arduino and Raspberry Pi modules, mirrors, plastic ribbons<br />115&times;350&times;160 cm<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>After the 2019 flood in Venice, which was caused by global warming, the not-for-profit organisation Factum Foundation launched a project for the digital preservation of the city, so that future generations of people&mdash;and, perhaps, artificial intelligence&mdash; will still be able to explore its architecture in the event that Venice disappears under the sea. Game designer and artist Asya Volodina presents Venice as seen by non-human agents, in this case fish.</p>
<p><em>Venice of Fish</em> is a game in which participants lie down under a &ldquo;board&rdquo; reminiscent of a fish&rsquo;s swim bladder (vesica piscis, Lat.). This shape has been the subject of numerous mystical speculations and is encountered in sacred geometry and masonic and Christian practices.</p>
<p>Although it explores disaster tourism, <em>Venice of Fish</em> was inspired not so much by ecological alarmism as by an experience of poetic chaos. In terms of nature, it was inspired by the flood (Volodina was in Venice when the water was at its highest), and in terms of culture by the immersive installation Deep See Blue Surrounding You by French artist Laure Prouvost, which was shown in the French Pavilion during the 58th Venice Biennale.</p>
<p>In describing her work, Volodina cites Joseph Brodsky&rsquo;s <em>Embankment of Incurables</em>: &ldquo;The boat&rsquo;s slow progress through the night was like the passage of a coherent thought through the subconscious.&rdquo; Here, alongside &ldquo;the subconscious,&rdquo; we find poetic chaos and the creative energy of nature (even if it poses a threat to everything that is too human).</p>
<p>The rules of the game imply a particular viewing choreography: participants are invited to try out the role of fish exploring the underwater sights and renounce their vertical stance. In this respect, like the work by Fedora Akimova exhibited&nbsp;</p>
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<p>next to it, Volodina&rsquo;s installation can be seen as a critique of anthropocentrism. As the critic Egor Sofronov pointed out in conversation with another artist in the exhibition, Daria Iuriichuk of the group Kafe-Morozhenoe, &ldquo;posthumanist and materialist critique of anthropocentrism&rdquo; is expressed &ldquo;through the materiality of films and shells, that is, of matrix-like and feminine deconstructions of the phallus as an erect supporting structure... through spatial images of horizontality.&rdquo;</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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Asya Volodina

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Non-human, museum" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2017.png" alt="Non-human, museum" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Fedora Akimova</strong><br /><strong><em>Antianthrop</em>, 2020&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Tulle, hand embroidery, plastic animal figures, fan <br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>The formal qualities and poetic agency of Fedora Akimova&rsquo;s work are reminiscent of Hans Haacke&rsquo;s famous installation <em>Blue Sail</em> (1964&ndash;1965), in which a piece of blue chiffon floats in the air and &ldquo;breathes&rdquo; like a living creature. Like Haacke, Akimova does not romanticize pristine nature. On the contrary, <em>Antianthrop</em> is an unsettling meditation on the post- or non- human perspective; an invitation, in the words of speculative realist philosopher Graham Harman, to a &ldquo;zero-person&rdquo; conversation. Hand embroidered landscapes on tulle present worlds abandoned by Homo sapiens or, perhaps, those who preceded us on this planet. Decolorized toy dinosaurs and animals draw our attention to some of the results of evolution&rsquo;s &ldquo;irrational&rdquo; creativity and remind us that humans are just one of its accidental products.</p>
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<p>The shimmering of the iridescent &ldquo;membranes&rdquo; in Akimova&rsquo;s work is a reference to Alex Garland&rsquo;s film <em>Annihilation</em> (2018). In the film and its literary source, the eponymous novel by New Weird author Jeff VanderMeer (who, like Harman, is inspired by Lovecraftian horror), a force meant to prevent an ecological disaster is sent to Earth, but a mistake leads to fascinating and horrifying genetic mutations: nature is no longer under human control.</p>
<p>Both <em>Annihilation</em> and Akimova&rsquo;s new work address ancient panpsychic fears of the Anthropocene: human helplessness before the vital force of rebellious Gaia, which turns us into animals or grows flowers through our bodies, refuses us our wholeness and breaks through our corporeal boundaries. In <em>Investigation of Horror</em>, Soviet writer and philosopher Leonid Lipavsky explained the fear of the force of life as one of &ldquo;viscous consistency, of colloids and emulsion; a fear of heterogeneity in which short-lived structures, clots, cords, threads of tension, and unstable independence emerge. Substances and environments that can evoke fear and disgust, include dirt, bogs, fat (especially viscous fats such as cod-liver oil or castor oil), slime, saliva (spit, mucus), blood, all products of glands, including seminal fluid; protoplasm in general. The latter deserves to be discussed separately. We are squeamish about living plasma for a reason. Life is always essentially viscous and murky. A living substance is one of which we cannot definitely say whether it is one creature or several. Now you see one knot in the plasma, and now there are two. Life fluctuates between the definite and the indefinite, individuation and non-individuality. This is its essence. In higher forms of life this aspect might be hidden, but it never disappears. This means that, first, there is something disgusting in every living creature, and second, a large number of creatures are clearly disgusting, which evokes groundless fear.&rdquo;</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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Fedora Akimova

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<p><strong>Dasha Trofimova</strong><br /><strong><em>Limbo</em>, 2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Digital print on paper, plywood <br />200&times;133&times;2.1 cm<br /> Courtesy of the artist</p>
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<p>In medieval Catholic theology, limbo was the place for souls who did not go to heaven, hell or purgatory; those who deserved neither eternal torment nor salvation, for example, unbaptized babies or those who died before the coming of Christ. Dasha Trofimova&rsquo;s <em>Limbo</em> features things left behind. They are no longer used by humans, but have not yet been recycled. The series began with objects from the artist&rsquo;s home in Pavlodar (Kazakhstan), abandoned following her family&rsquo;s emigration to Russia. It continues to unfold in the spaces of former Soviet research institutes temporarily rented out as artists&rsquo; studios, among other things, but which, at the next turn of the samsara- gentrification wheel, are destined for demolition to make way for luxury housing. A personal story featuring family objects thus becomes a prototype for a collective one, reflecting the historical moment of creative clusters&rsquo; fragile presence on the ruins of scientific institutions, before the earth beneath them takes on a new life involving a mortgage. The photographs in the exhibition were taken at Moscow&rsquo;s Giredmet and Phazotron research institutes, which are marked for demolition.</p>
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<p>There is no nostalgic mood or trendy vintage styling in the series. Trofimova collects things into seemingly unstable, absurd, somewhat sad, and slightly ironic heaps, which look like they will collapse immediately after the shoot. Rather than documenting a moment gone by in the manner of Susan Sontag, here photography is used by the artist as a means of staging a possible presence of things in space and time, and new connections between them. The large scale of the prints means the things are almost life-size. Mounted on sheets of plywood leaning against the wall, they appear to transfer the artist&rsquo;s &ldquo;collages&rdquo; into the exhibition space. It is not the ruins of former utopias&mdash;a subject much in demand by previous generations of artists working with the medium of photography&mdash;that stand before us but a speculative documentation of current processes, where the artist demonstrates an interest in collective memory, including the memory of these alien found objects that is shared with other people.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
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Dasha Trofimova

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<p><strong>Marina Istomina </strong><br /><strong><em>Suffocation</em>, 2020</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Three-channel slide film, 23&rsquo; <br />Courtesy of the artist<br /><br />Archive images courtesy of Valentina Sokolnikova and the Krasnoyarsk Krai Museum of the Forest, Krasnoyarsk<br /><strong>Translation:</strong> Karina Talipova</p>
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<p>Marina Istomina started working on <em>Suffocation</em> in the summer of 2019, when, as a resident of the town of Ust-Kut in Irkutsk Oblast, she found herself within the zone of the annual forest fires. Exhausted by the endless repetition of this environmental problem and worried about its scale and complex causes, the artist began to chronicle the event in the manner of American photographer Robert Adams, creating implicitly silent images that captured the destructive changes in the landscape caused by external forces. Aiming to convey what was happening in its entirety, including her own physical and psychological sense of suffocation, Istomina started adding new shots, archival materials, and texts to these photographs, introducing complementary plots and thus turning a documentary narrative into a multidimensional speculative story. The artist works with the themes of memory and trauma and often uses this method to explore socially significant events of various scales (from regional fires to the murder of a local crime boss) through personal experience.</p>
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<p>The current exhibition presents a new display of <em>Suffocation</em>, in the form of a three-channel slide film. The plot develops around three female characters introduced by Istomina&mdash;a witness, a researcher, and a shaman&mdash;each of whom experiences the fire in a unique way. The witness keeps a diary and lives through suffocation as a bodily experience; the researcher tries to comprehend its essence rationally; the shaman is a trickster speaking on behalf of the mythological image of the forest. Each moves along their own storyline at the beginning, then at a certain point the lines intersect and the characters merge, only to disintegrate and reassemble in a new way. The story of the forest fire in which the characters are involved turns out to be larger than them and absorbs them, but it is also cyclical. For Istomina, the looped development of the plot is associated with the passage of time for the people of Ust- Kut, who live through the fire risk season. As she puts it, &ldquo;spring means tense expectation, summer is the culmination, in autumn the fire dies down, in winter there is silence, and then the whole cycle repeats.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Istomina identifies the films of David Lynch as visual and structural allusions informing<em> Suffocation</em>. The project features a number of cross-cutting references to his work: a non-linear plot, the multiplicity and inconstancy of the characters&rsquo; personalities, a permanent feeling of the presence of &ldquo;dark forces,&rdquo; and the image of fire as a raging primal force that connects the real world and afterworlds. &ldquo;Fire walk with me,&rdquo; the famous line from a poem repeated by the characters of Lynch&rsquo;s TV show Twin Peaks, resonates with an important text featured in the project, an eighteenth-century Tungus shamanic incantation: &lsquo;&rsquo;Be fertile, be laughing, train a good hunter for God, take care of your husband, bring up your child well, let him have plenty of fire.&rdquo;</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
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Marina Istomina

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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Mitya%20Zilberstein_.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1107" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Mitya Zilberstein in collaboration with Nataliya Tazbash</strong><br /><strong><em>SiNai</em>, 2020&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Sand, chalk, garbage, bones, mollusc shells, video (10&rsquo; 31&rdquo;) <br />Dimensions variable<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><strong>Sound, music:</strong> Nikita Vasilenko<br /> <strong>Color correction:</strong> Vladimir Mogilevsky <br />With Father Justin</p>
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<p>The focus of Mitya Zilberstein&rsquo;s works is often paradoxical places, such as Crimea or the Sinai Peninsula. In describing these places the term &ldquo;militourism&rdquo; is useful, coined by I-Kiribati and African-American poet Teresia Teaiwa for Pacific Island states and indicating a symbiotic merger of the military industrial complex and the tourism industry. Consider this description of Crimea by linguist and historian Andrei Zorin: &ldquo;The world of white houses by the sea, gravel paths among laurel bushes, alleys of cypresses with plaster vases and statues, buglers in crimson kerchiefs at morning line-up, vacationers strolling in white pyjamas&mdash;this was our ancient Greece, our paradise, even though it was cleansed of excessive ethnic diversity by the father of the peoples after the war. But it was accessible, available through a trade union tour or via a directive from the pioneer organization for a citizen of the empire. Here they could holiday in peace, for the Red Banner Black Sea Fleet was on guard in Sevastopol&rsquo;s bays, with sailors in white and blue uniforms and caps for whom girls in far-off villages were pining needlessly. It is here that the everyday and militaristic interpretations of Crimea&rsquo;s allure for Russians become indistinguishable.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Zilberstein, however, assumes a much broader perspective on such regions. The Sinai Peninsula in his latest work is a place of worship, a vibrant ecosystem, a garbage dump, and, to a lesser degree, a recreation zone and a military area. In this video essay based on a three-month journey to Sinai, Zilberstein explores anthropogenic traces in the desert and the slow pace of deep, geological time. The ecosophical leitmotif links <em>SiNai</em> to Cyprien Gaillard&rsquo;s video <em>Ocean II Ocean</em>, which mixes shots of fossils in the walls and floors of metro stations in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union with archival footage of New York subway cars being dumped in the ocean. The instinctive desire to compare Zilberstein&rsquo;s video essay to the works of the Palestinian-Russian artist and Arab Futurist Larissa Sansour is an error. The artist rightly interprets the desert as a database, because silicon (the &ldquo;Si&rdquo; in the work&rsquo;s title) is a component of sand and an essential material in the manufacturing of modern computers (techno- optimistic &ldquo;readings&rdquo; of silicon as a symbol of high-tech industry and the main alternative to carbon life are left aside). Enriching and developing the comparison, Zilberstein introduces the concept of an archive-ecosystem&mdash;a symbiotic community of independent agents in a complex relationship of forming, exchanging, and spreading material evidence.</p>
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<p>Zilberstein&rsquo;s interpretation of the desert is a form of &ldquo;radical textology&rdquo; bringing a number of very different texts into a single hermeneutic circle as equals. On the screen, the &ldquo;natural text&rdquo; given in the landscape appears alongside graffiti, scraps of paper, and manuscripts from St. Catherine&rsquo;s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. The video&rsquo;s &ldquo;subtitles&rdquo; mention the Scriptures and petroglyphs, and within the installation there is a quote adapted from Donna Haraway&mdash;&ldquo;We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman.&rdquo;&mdash;which is translated into Biblical Hebrew and written in the Proto-Sinaitic script. Revisiting the famous biblical connection between human (Adam) and Earth (adamah), the quote brings together and disproves two mythologemes: the idea of human exceptionalism and the uncertain perspective of technological immortality. A real desert becomes a reminder of &ldquo;the desert of the real&rdquo; from the Matrix tetralogy, a sad landscape with charred ruins of the human world.</p>
<p>Another closure of the circle takes place at the level of the material embodiment of the work: the sand and the chalk inscription in the installation relate to a desert filled with biogenic material.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>IV</em></p>
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Mitya Zilberstein in collaboration with Nataliya Tazbash

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Non-human, code" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2018.png" alt="Non-human, code" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Theater%20of%20Mutual%20Operations%20collective_(1).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1064" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Theater of Mutual Operations</strong><br /><strong>The University of Birds, 2020&ndash;2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Multimedia installation / immersive performance <br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><strong>Composers:</strong> Alexey Nadzharov, Alexey Syumak<br /> <strong>Performers:</strong> Olga Vlasova and Natalia Sokolovskaya Lighting <br /><strong>Designer:</strong> Elena Perelman</p>
<p><em>The University of Birds</em> was first staged as an immersive performance-travelogue in Moscow&rsquo;s Boyar Chambers in the fall of 2020, where it blended so organically with the venue&rsquo;s ancient architecture of brick arches and vaults that transferring it to Garage seemed almost impossible. However, like many universities it has successfully &ldquo;sprouted&rdquo; a new branch, which is exhibited here as an interactive installation. The route through the <em>University</em> installation begins at the dead-end staircase in Garage Café, where a gallery of hagiographic bird &ldquo;icons&rdquo; is located. Visitors can then go up to a secret space on the mezzanine floor, where there are &ldquo;eaves&rdquo; with talking and chirping birdhouses, and on into a classroom (the performance will take place in other Museum spaces).</p>
<p>The impulse for Theater of Mutual Operations&rsquo; new project was the lockdown in spring 2020, when the world slowed down so radically that many people discovered new &ldquo;abilities,&rdquo; such as the daily observation of the arrival of spring or an interest in birdwatching. Meditative birdwatching fits perfectly into the eco-critical reassessment of our relationship with other species, while the proposed study of bird language brings to mind the &ldquo;speechcreator&rdquo; (rechetvorets) Velimir Khlebnikov, whose father was an ornithologist, as was the French composer Olivier Messiaen, whose works featuring birdsong motifs informed the musical minimalism of <em>The University of Birds</em>. For the authors of the installation and performance, bird languages are an analogue of angelic languages, which lie beyond our comprehension.</p>
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<p>While embodying flight and freedom and acting as a metaphor for peace and the spirit, birds are also considered to be more primitive creatures than mammals or even pests. The marginal scenes of the abovementioned &ldquo;icons&rdquo; portray the life and death of extinct bird species such as the dodo, exterminated in the seventeenth century. The classroom tables feature infographics with various facts from bird history. The bird transliteration lesson, the story of the sparrow &ldquo;genocide&rdquo; in China, and the pantheon of extinct species act as a metaphorical reflection of the human world, with its xenophobia and intolerance, colonial trauma, issues of minority rights, and environmental threats. These subjects also reference a new type of knowledge, empathetic and intuitive, which could possibly change us by achieving understanding through a metalanguage and help build a better world. Such &ldquo;situated knowledges,&rdquo; to use feminist scholar Donna Haraway&rsquo;s term, involve the rejection of a neutral view from above and the choice of a modest witness position instead, which avoids representation but requires ethical and political responsibility.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>EL</em></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">The performance will take place within the installation. Please check the schedule at the information desk or on the Events page at garagemca.org.</p>
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Theater of Mutual Operations

<p><strong><img style="float: right;" title="Market, secret" src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%2016%20(1).png" alt="Market, secret" width="1361" height="101" /></strong></p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong><strong><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_030321Garage_008.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1067" /></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>NONSNS hybrid self-organized group </strong><br /><strong><em>NONSNS SHOW</em>, 2021</strong></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">YouTube show in four parts<br />Duration variable<br />Courtesy of the artists</p>
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<p>The members of <em>NONSNS</em> strive to occupy a speculative position in the local art community. While labeling <em>NONSNS</em> a hybrid self-organized group, they distance themselves from the parameters and criteria of even this flexible institutional model, preferring the fluid and mutable identity of a &ldquo;needed ordinary naive speculative new self-organization.&rdquo; Performing with the resounding slogan &ldquo;Make Art <em>NONSNS</em> Again,&rdquo; their practice is informed by irony, simulation, and pirate schemes.</p>
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<p>The group&rsquo;s works exist in the discursive field of blurring the boundaries between &ldquo;high&rdquo; and &ldquo;low&rdquo; art forms. <em>NONSNS</em> openly appropriates the mechanisms inherent in contemporary mass culture, namely celebrity culture. Constructing a fake story about their massive success, they release souvenirs, shoot (and appear in) ads, work with images of pop stars, and design videos using guidelines for promoting materials on social media. In the spirit of postmodern parody, <em>NONSNS</em> reassemble these attributes of &ldquo;low&rdquo; culture, embedding them in the context of &ldquo;high&rdquo; contemporary art.</p>
<p><em>NONSNS SHOW</em> employs the medium of popular TV shows. In four &ldquo;episodes&rdquo; based on four different models of popular programs, the artists attempt to test the willingness of workers in the field of contemporary art to build strong relationships with each other, ask them awkward questions using made-up quizzes, embark on a public speculative investigation, and put together a fictional late-night show. TV games, quizzes, reality and talk shows have often found their way into contemporary art, both as an object of research and a means of expression. Dara Birnbaum studied the gestures and facial expressions of participants in the game show <em>Hollywood Squares</em> as examples of imposed gender-based behaviors (<em>Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry</em>, 1979); Michelle Deignan reconstructed the interior architecture of the <em>Fifteen to One quiz show</em> (15:1, 2001); and Gillian Wearing&rsquo;s <em>Family History</em> (2006) used talk show elements to explore the changing role of reality TV. Media researcher Maeve Connelly notes that such projects often portray the television studio as a pseudo- private zone, a space of simulation, pre-programmed behavioral conventions, and pre-staged representation of relationships. The authors of <em>NONSNS SHOW</em> place themselves and their fellow art practitioners in this situation, attempting to undermine the system&rsquo;s concealed mechanisms and thereby bring them to the surface.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em>ES</em></p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><em>NONSNS SHOW</em> episodes are available on the Garage YouTube channel.</p>
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NONSNS hybrid self-organized group

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<p>In order to put together a show conceived during the first lockdown, Garage announced its first ever exhibition open call, inviting artists and creative collectives living and working in Russia to assume any distance in relation to the current situation and to consider speculations in a broad philosophical sense: as a form of interaction with reality and/or as speculative reasoning about the possible. Arising as an unplanned event in the Museum&rsquo;s exhibition calendar and initially driven by the humanitarian mission of helping the art community, <em>Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene</em> was designed to allow artists to implement new large-scale and ambitious works. Thirty-three participants, including 11 group projects, were selected from over 1,000 applications.</p>
<p>Although abstract reasoning may appear to be a thankless task, art incorporates the power of imagination, and in the current state of suspension this quixotic resource is in great demand. &ldquo;Speculations, fakes, and predictions&rdquo; in the title of the exhibition represent various versions of art&rsquo;s &ldquo;distance&rdquo; in relation to reality, a distance that each artist chooses independently in line with their personal working methods.</p>
<p><em>Assuming Distance</em> introduces a wide range of forecasts, insights, and scenarios: absurd, fantastic, visionary, and frighteningly realistic. The works on display address not only the future but also possible versions of the past or present. They interpret speculation in an extremely broad way, from the figure of the profiteer to secret societies, from alternative medicine to technology start-ups, from trickster investigations and parafictions to imaginary museums. Whether these hypothetical worlds relate to alternative economies or conspiracy theories, new forms of employment and social interaction or systems of control and biopolitics, each of them references the economic, political, and social models discussed or derives from paradoxical and irrational creative thinking.</p>
<p>The exhibition design by Novoe Architecture Bureau ties together the Central and East Galleries by way of a unified super-surface drawn on a modular grid and composed of luminous frosted glass squares. Viewers are encouraged to follow a designated route, with movement through the exhibition resembling the playthrough of a computer game. This gamified environment is inspired by sci-fi movies and arcade video games, while also referencing crosswords, application forms, questionnaires, and the recommended social distance of 1.8m. It is also reminiscent of walking on special gangways, like those installed in Venice during the <em>acqua alta</em>. This movement turns the viewing experience into an adventure, while undermining routine and guaranteed positions in space and thus creating a new physical and visual experience.</p>
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<p>The exhibition operates as a nonlinear system of intersecting themes that create fluid connections between the works and organize semantic navigation by folding into constellational configurations.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">Ekaterina Lazareva <br />Ekaterina Savchenko <br />Iaroslav Volovod</p>
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