Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Announces Plans for 2019

Date

15 NOV 2018

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art announces the highlights of its 2019 program. An ambitious exhibition program will bring together cutting-edge Russian and international art, and highlight overlooked artists. In 2019, the Museum will tackle ecological issue for the first time.

Garage will present two solo exhibitions: by the British-Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen and Moscow Conceptualist Pavel Pepperstein. In the second half of the year, the group exhibition The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100 will focus on ecological issues and the role art can play in defining our future. In line with the global importance of the issue, the exhibition will include works by over 50 artists from around the world and Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping will create a Garage Atrium Commission for the Museum building. The Puerto-Rico-based duo Allora & Calzadilla will create a new work on the theme of ecology as the 2019 Garage Square Commission. Garage Live will present a series of events specially conceived for The Coming World. In Spring, Garage will become a forum for discussing the educational power of art with the project Bureau des Transmissions. The first event in the upcoming year is the ninth iteration of Art Experiment, The Miracle of Light, which marks the 180th anniversary of the invention of photography.

Each exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive public program developed for a range of age groups. Family and teens days, public lectures, and seminars are specially developed to complement the exhibition themes and involve audiences in new ways.

Garage will be closely involved in the training of a new generation of professionals in the field of contemporary art through its new Master's program Practices of Contemporary Art and Curatorship at the Higher School of Economics. Admission will begin in spring, and students will gain both theoretical knowledge and practical skills in curatorship, exhibition making, and project management.

The process of filling gaps and accumulating knowledge about the history of Russian contemporary art is closely connected with the creation of infrastructure for artists themselves. In January 2019, the Museum launches Garage Studios at VDNKh park in Moscow. Eighteen studios for Moscow-based and regional artists will open in a renovated pavilion.

Garage will continue to support the local artistic community and strengthen inter-institutional ties in Russia and abroad. In 2019, the Museum will launch the sixth program of support for regional institutions, which will focus on establishing local archives of contemporary art. The materials will also be digitized and uploaded to the Russian Art Archives Network (RAAN) site.

After successful participation in Astana EXPO-2017, collaboration with Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture in Kazakhstan, and the Curatorial Summer School in Uzbekistan, Garage will continue to work with institutions in post-Soviet countries. The 7th Garage International Conference will focus on the cultural situation in the former Soviet Union. Scholars, curators, and artists will discuss the legacy of Soviet cultural policy and new strategies of integration into the international context.

Since Garage launched its publishing program, it has printed more than 800,000 copies. In 2019, it will publish over 50 new titles, including memoirs by Pavel Pepperstein and Sergei Eisenstein and Alisa Savitskaya and Artyom Filatov’s A Short History of Nizhny Novgorod Street Art (winner of the GARAGE.txt grant in 2018). The GARAGE Dance book series will be supplemented with a lecture series revealing the connection between dance and performance and introducing audiences to performance curators as well as artists.

In spring, an open call will invite researchers of Russian art to apply for the Archive Summer program, which provides grants for conducting research based on Garage Archive Collection, the world's largest collection of material on the history of Russian contemporary art.

Next year’s summer film program will take place in the new Garage Screen Pavilion. At the end of 2018, Garage will announce the winner of a nationwide competition for the design of the pavilion. The new pavilion will open in spring 2019 and will once again present festival favorites, classic movies, directorial experiments, and avant-garde films.

In 2019, the Museum’s Inclusive Programs Department will expand into the new area of work with migrants. The focus will be on involving migrants and refugees in the Museum’s exhibition and education programs. The annual inclusion conference Experiencing the Museum will also focus on working with the migrant community.

Other major projects for next year include J-FEST Summer, the annual outdoor festival of Japanese culture, which attracted over 100,000 visitors in 2018; the 4th Garage Art Book Fair, which will include masterclasses, meetings with authors, and a program for publishing professionals; the family festival Garage Under-18; and the new season of Mosaic Music.

The Garage team is an integral part of these projects. Acknowledging the urgent need for  solutions to environmental problems in a global context, the Museum will launch a program of conscious consumption as a part of its sustainable development strategy.

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