Garage launches a program in support of films at the intersection with contemporary art

Sasha Kulak
Film still from A Hawk as Big as a Horse, 2021
Courtesy of the artist

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art announces the launch of a new grant. From 2021, the Museum will support the creation of experimental films and cinematic works at the intersection with contemporary art. This initiative is a logical continuation of the Museum’s existing grant programs, which currently include grants for artists working in the field of contemporary art, the Garage Digital grant program, GARAGE.txt grants for researchers, and Archive Summer.

Experimental cinema is the most vulnerable and least popular area within the Russian film industry, and therefore requires special support and attention. Noncommercial films, including those made for museums and art galleries, connect cinema with various contemporary art mediums, such as performance, video art, and installation. They take a different approach to cinematic language and its perception, and in many respects touch on the principles by which cinema may exist in the future. The Garage film grant continues the Museum’s wider activity focusing on the moving image, in particular the Garage Screen film program and the new book series Garage Screen.

The first project to be supported by Garage is the debut feature by artist and director Sasha Kulak, A Hawk as Big as a Horse. At once a collage and a performance, in this film radical human fantasy is embodied through documentary experience, and a fictional cinematic universe is experienced as part of the everyday, becoming a means of shaping and expanding identity.

Kulak’s film was selected by the Museum’s curatorial board. In future, program participants will be selected based on an open competition. Detailed information about the film grant, its structure, and its size will be announced by the end of 2021.

About the director

Sasha Kulak (b. 1990, Vitebsk, Belorussian SSR) is an artist. She is a master’s student at Central Saint Martins (London), who works with a variety of mediums and formats as a cinematographer and director. She is the author of the films Salamanca (with Ruslan Fedotov, 2015), Quicksilver Chronicles (with Ben Gez, 2019), and A Hawk as Big as a Horse (produced by Les Steppes Production, Paris; 2021). She lives and works in London and Moscow.