Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will present its public program at Uzbekistan’s first Center for Contemporary Art

In 2019, Garage continues to work with cultural institutions of the post-Soviet space. Aimed at the fulfillment of joint research, exhibition and education programs and the development of contemporary art and culture, participation in regional and international projects is an important part of the Museum’s commitment.

Garage is going to become public program partner during the launch of Uzbekistan’s first Center for Contemporary Art that will open its doors on April 12. The opening will feature a personal show of the Uzbek director and video artist Saodat Ismailova Qo’rg’on chiroq (Light Hill), a theatrical performance, and a comprehensive public program. In collaboration with Garage, the Center has prepared a series of workshops for families and children introducing the key terms and movements in contemporary art, architecture, and design. Garage Screen Film Festival will open with five films about influential artists and contemporary art devotees alongside films about art practices. The program includes: Poor Folk. Kabakovs—a documentary portrait of Moscow Conceptualism’s key figures, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, directed by Anton Zhelnov; Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a documentary by Sara Driver plunging the audience into the atmosphere of New York of the 1970s and 1980s; Kusama: Infinity, Heather Lenz’s story of one of the most famous contemporary female artists Yayoi Kusama’s “galaxy”; Julian Rosenfeldt’s festival blockbuster Manifesto starring Cate Blanchett; and Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back—a film documenting the preparation of the legendary artist’s 2011–2012 major retrospective Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 

The Center is located in a 1912 building designed by the architect Wilgelm Geinzelman. Occupied by a diesel power station before the October Revolution, it later hosted the Tashkent City Enterprise of Electric Grids. In 2018 the building was assigned to the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Uzbekistan.