International Sign Fingerspelling Featured on Garage T-shirts and Sweatshirts

Date

25 APR 2019

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is the first among Russian cultural institutions to develop inclusion in all of its spheres of activity, paying particular attention to the deaf community, and supports and promotes the use of Russian Sign Language. It also produces a variety of souvenirs and accessories that help to introduce visitors to deaf culture, including holographic postcards featuring international sign fingerspelling. Garage has also prepared and released a dictionary of contemporary art terms in Russian Sign Language.

The Museum’s audience is much wider and global than its geographical affiliation. By maintaining the status of an international institution and cultivating the principles of inclusion, Garage is expressing and retranslating the current urgent necessity of studying the international basics of sign-language communication in Russia. The Museum regularly delivers creative workshops, lectures, and guided tours adapted for deaf visitors, along with running events for a wider audience dedicated to the global culture of the deaf community. Last year, for example, Garage became the first public platform in Russia to have introduced Visual Vernacular, a genre of visual arts that was adapted for Russian Sign Language.

As much as English for hearing people, international signs have become the basis of formal and informal communication between deaf people worldwide, who interact with each other using signs from their national languages mixed with international and iconic gestures, while also implementing grammatical nuances considered common for all Western sign languages.

In spring 2019, Garage expanded the range of its accessories which acquaint the Museum’s visitors with the culture of the deaf community and the sign language by producing a series of clothing with inscriptions in international sign fingerspelling. The new collection features t-shirts and sweatshirts with the GARAGE logo in international sign fingerspelling and the fingerspelling alphabet imprinted on the back .

Coinciding with the launch of the sweatshirts, Garage will deliver a number of special education events. The Museum will run a cycle of workshops together with the deaf pedagogue and activist Alina Lupookova, dedicated to the study of international signs, where any visitor will have the opportunity to learn the vocabulary and grammatical universals typical of the linguistic system of many sign languages, and will be trained to make some common gestures. Meanwhile, the renowned linguist and Russian Sign Language expert Anna Komarova will clarify for the audience the theory, history, and key issues related to international signs and will prepare them for the successful mastery thereof.

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