Winners of the Grant Program for Publishers

Date

25 SEP 2020

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and the German Book Office, representing the Frankfurter Buchmesse in Moscow, have announced the winners of their joint grant program for publishers.

The program to support the publishing community received 363 applications, of which Garage selected eight publishing projects, and six more were chosen by Frankfurter Buchmesse.

The following projects will receive funding from Garage Museum of Contemporary Art: 

Anthology.doc (publishing program of Theatre.doc). This anthology brings together documentary plays that were staged at Treatre.doc from 2002 to 2020, as well as texts on their making. Assembled in one book, they present the history of contemporary Russia, featuring migrants and journalists, terrorism and television, doctors and prisoners. 

Graphic novel Refugees (joint project by Samokat Publishing and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). The book tells the stories of seven children who had to leave their homes and found themselves in Russia, where they are now learning to live in a world very different from the one they were used to.

Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? (N.I. Novikov Publishing). This study questions some of the central principles and ideas at the foundation of the history of art—and the possibility of a single congruent art history. 

Jon McNaught. Kingdom (BUMKNIGA). Jon McNaught is a printmaker and printmaking instructor, a true master of color who creates complex images through the delicate layering of pigments. His vision of life is a dense flow of sensory experiences: light and shadow, textures, scents and noises, chatter, the rustle of paper, bird sounds, signs and logos on trucks passing by.

Paul B. Preciado. An Apartment on Uranus (NoKiddingPress). In their latest book, Preciado reflects on gender transitioning (transformation from Beatriz into Paul B.) and other political and cultural transitions, discussing current socio-political issues—from the rise of neofascism and the criminalization of migrants in Europe to the harassment of trans children, the technological appropriation of the uterus, and the role of artists and museums in the writing of a new social contract.

Andrée Sentaurens. Seventeen Years in the Soviet Camps (Publishing program of GULAG History Museum). The book of memoirs by a French author who has survived Stalin-era camps is, for the first time, translated into Russian. During the Soviet years, the manuscript was stored in a classified archive of the library of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was accessible only to a small number of people.

Olga Khoroshilova. Russian Travesti (MIF publishing). Khoroshilova’s study of the Russian LGBT+ culture from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century draws on unpublished archival sources and photographs. From the first male actor who played Joan of Arc and the Russian uncle Max, to Anne Lister’s Russian journey and the unusual wardrobe of Empress Elizaveta—this history of travesti spans three centuries.

Hito Steyerl. Beyond Representation (Krasnaya Lastochka). The book looks into images and sounds that, in a changing world, develop new relationships with objects, become objects themselves, or produce other objects and images. 

The German Book Office representing Frankfurter Buchmesse in Moscow will support the following publications:

Siegfried Unseld. Travel Reports (libra). One of the key German publishers of the twentieth century, the head of the publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, Siegfried Unseld, discovered many authors and texts that are today read internationally and laid the foundations of European publishing ethics.

Sacha Batthyany. A Crime in the Family: A World War II Secret Buried in Silence (Ivan Limbakh Publishing House). After discovering that his great aunt was involved in a Nazi crime, journalist Sacha Batthyany starts an ambitious investigation centered on his own family’s history, meticulously collecting materials on the twentieth-century events that directly or indirectly affected his ancestors.

Marion Poschmann. The Pine Islands (MIF). With a European and a Japanese man of very different views on life as its protagonists, this philosophical novel explores the cultural differences between the East and the West and depression as the main disease of the twenty-first century.

Martin Burckhardt: A Short History of Digitalisation (Ad Marginem Press). Telling the history of discoveries that have led to the invention of artificial intelligence, media theorist and cultural critic Martin Burckhardt shows that digitalisation is but a logical next step in human development and nothing to be afraid of.

Jacob von Staehlin. Turned Everything on Its Head: Jacob von Staehlin’s notes on the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in the 1860s and 70s (Rostok Publishing).

Scholar Jacob von Staehlin (1709–1785) arrived at St Petersburg from Leipzig and stayed in Russia for half-a-century. His Notes are a unique source on the academic, social, political, financial, and publishing activities at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the eighteenth century, as well as on its everyday life.

Otto Hoetzsch. Russia: An Introduction to Its History from the war against Japan to the World War (Posev Publishing). One of Germany’s key scholars that specialized in Russian history, Otto Hoetzsch, was among the pioneers of Slavic Studies and the founder of the Journal Osteuropa (Eastern Europe). His in-depth knowledge of various aspects of life in Russia was reflected in several books he wrote on the country, as well as a number of social and cultural initiatives.

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