Library

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has a public library on Russian and international contemporary art open to all visitors. Garage Library is a reference library and has a collection of 30,000 books, including catalogues of solo and group exhibitions and studies on contemporary art and culture.

Launched in 2014, Garage Library became the first public library in Russia devoted entirely to the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Publications available at the library cover a wide range of subjects related to the development of art from early modernism and the avant-garde to the present day: artistic practices, contemporary philosophy, cultural studies, social theory, gender and postcolonial studies, media theory, visual studies, photography, architecture, design, cinema, theatre, and fiction

The collection keeps expanding with the addition of new publications. Along with exhibition catalogues from Russian and international museums (Tretyakov Gallery, Russian Museum, Stedelijk, Centre Pompidou, MoMA), the library acquires new studies released by leading Russian and international publishers (NLO, HSE, MIT Press, Hatje Cantz, Gestalten). In addition to new releases, the library boasts a collection of rare books.

A wide selection of periodicals from across the world includes key journals on visual art (Artforum, Flash Art, Mousse), photography (Aperture, Camera Austria, Foam) and architecture (Architectural Review, Domus, Mark). Along with recent issues, the library holds copies of rare archived issues of art theory and criticism journals (October, Third Text), and Russian periodicals from before and after perestroika (A-Ya, Mesto pechati, Kabinet, Dekorativnoye iskusstvo).

All books and catalogues published by Garage, including those in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press, are also available at the library.

Visitors can access the online catalogue to search for books and periodicals by subject, key words, authors, and personalities.

Several tables at the library are equipped with computers; visitors have access to the Internet and academic resources like Artstor and JSTOR, and are welcome to use the free scanners.

To bring books in its collection to the public attention, Garage Library runs a program of public events and reading groups.

In 2017, the library launched Single Copy, a project to support the development of the genre of the artist’s book in Russia.

Tuesday–Friday: 1 p.m.–9 p.m.
Saturday: 12 a.m.–8 p.m.
The library is closed on Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays.

All services at the library (admission, scanning, wi-fi) are free of charge.
To use the library, please bring your passport and get a library pass.
Visitors can only scan texts if they bring their own portable storage device.
Publications labeled "on request" are provided on request and should be returned to the librarian.

Library catalogue

Go to catalogue

Storage location

Garage Archive Collection
Garage Archive Collection

Subjects

Authors

New arrivals

Vis-a-vision. Conversations with Russian Artists 1979-2013

2017

In the Soviet era Victor Tupitsyn had already begun making recordings in Moscow kitchens and studios of conversations with Russian conceptual artists. They were intended for readers who had no access to these artists, as their work ran foul of official conceptions of art in the Soviet Union and were not shown in exhibitions. Today Russian conceptualism is considered as one of the most influential art tendencies of the late twentieth century. Like many other Russian intellectuals and artists, Tupitsyn emigrated to New York in the 1970s, where he continued the conversations he had begun. In Vis-à-vision he emerges as an astute interview partner who knows how to build connections between the separate worlds. The conversations, which are here published in full for the first time, feature Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Komar & Melamid, Erik Bulatov, and the groups Collective Actions and Inspection Medical Hermeneutics as well as many others.