Garage Museum of Contemporary Art continues its GARAGE.txt program of support for contemporary art and culture research and announces a new call for grant applications.
GARAGE.txt is Russia’s first long-term museum initiative supporting current academic research in a vast range of humanitarian subjects. It offers funding for new projects and opportunities to publish completed manuscripts and projects conducted by Russian as well as international researchers writing in the Russian language. Garage accepts applications with original studies by individual or collective authors in the history and theory of art in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, aesthetics, new media theory, the sociology of culture, critical theory of contemporaneity, and the history of Russian contemporary art.
So far, Garage has published three books by the participants of the grant program: Vladimir Salnikov’s collection of articles Picasso Has Never Heard of Us edited by Irina Gorlova, which includes reflections on the culture of the four decades from the 1960s to the early 2000s; Cybernetics in Humanities and Arts in the USSR—Yanina Prudenko’s study of Soviet cybernetic art and Soviet cybernetics in general; and Katerina Lopatkina’s research Bastards of Cultural Relations exploring the system of international artistic contacts in the USSR from the 1920s to the 1950s.
“My book Bastards of Cultural Relations was published in 2019 thanks to the GARAGE.txt program, transforming several years of research and meticulous collection of archival sources into a printed publication. A thousand thanks to the experts who selected my script among many others.
Strictly speaking, “typological” stories of twentieth-century art in the context of Soviet ideology are not exactly a part of contemporary art history. However, at the beginning of my research, I wished to grasp what the environment was like back then—that “feeding basis” which still informs the perception of Western art in Russia today and, to some extent, directs the work of cultural institutions. In this sense, indeed, this is a book about contemporary art. Post-Soviet. Odd. Ours.
I am very hopeful that many new books will be released within this program and many interesting meetings are awaiting us in the future—with the new authors and the constantly evolving text of contemporary art.
Katerina Lopatkina
Application deadline: November16, 2019