Garage, Archived coincides with the first anniversary of Garage’s move to its permanent home in Gorky Park.
This exhibition is the first project to draw on the Museum’s institutional archive, sharing with audiences key milestones, such as the reconstruction of the historical spaces it has occupied, the experiences of the people who shape its inner workings, and the evolution of the educational and exhibition programs.
The institutional archive is a special part of Garage Archive Collection, as it thoroughly documents the Museum’s history, including architectural drawings and models of the buildings Garage has occupied, exhibition plans, lists of artworks, photographs of festive crowds at exhibition openings, video recordings of lectures, invitation cards, and even samples of the souvenirs Garage has produced in years past. Visitors to Garage, Archived will see the Museum’s history as it has been unfolding in front of them day after day, year after year, in thousands of glossy photos and official papers, in the whimsical cartoons made by young Museum staff, and in architectural projects. And this is only a fraction of the Collection.
At the exhibition, visitors will also get the chance to look back on the Museum’s eight-year history in real time: Garage’s research team has recorded ten video interviews with several members of staff, some of whom have been working at Garage since it was founded in 2008.
For something quite different, one part of the exhibition is dedicated to an unusual archaeological collection, discovered during construction on the site of the new Garage building: medical vessels, and ink and perfume containers, dated back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Special events, programmed over Garage’s birthday weekend include a performance, Art Out Loud, on June 11, where actors will animate the poetry of artists in Garage Archive Collection, from the Romantics of the 1960s and the Conceptualists of the 1970s, to the “new wavers” of the 1980s and the Moscow radical actionists of the 1990s.
On June 12, a round table discussion, Moscow Conceptualism Archived will feature three active representatives of Moscow Conceptualism today who have recently contributed to Garage Archive: curator and art critic Joseph Backstein, and artists George Kiesewalter and Igor Makarevich. Dedicated to the complexities of writing a history of Moscow Conceptualism in retrospect, this discussion will explore how to approach the live artistic practices of the 1970s and 1980s that weren’t always recorded at the time.
