Open Storage. A Prologue

Garage presents the first stage of the showing of its collection of contemporary art.

In 2012, Garage began building an archive collection about Russian contemporary art. As information about the artistic process during the last 70 years accumulated, the structure of the archive became more complex, and some materials proved problematic to categorize and use. Sometimes materials were both a historical document and an artwork, while others lost their artistic meaning in the archival context. Materials with dual identities include sketches, performance props, excerpts from video installations, and so on. The impetus for the creation of the contemporary art collection was the desire to reinstate these items.

Emphasizing the connection between the Museum’s archive and the emerging collection, the project Open Storage. A Prologue will comprise a large corpus of archival material and a selection of newly acquired works.

Misha Le Jen. Fountain. Saratov, Volga, 2003. Video documentation of an action at Saratov River Port, 3’ 14”. Edition 1/5. Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Photo: Yuri Puzanov

Kirill Glushchenko. Moscow Lights, 2020. Full HD video, 23’ 30”. Edition 2/5. Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

PRESS

Прикосновенный запас

The Blueprint

Прошлое, оно же настоящее. В «Гараже» стартовал проект «Открытое хранение»

SETTERS Media

Открытый вопрос «Открытого хранения»

АРТГИД

Gallery

Photo: Varvara Toplennikova
© Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Public program

The public program for Open Storage. A Prologue, entitled A History of Intensive Intentions, resumes the dialogue with Museum visitors and is based around audience experience.

A History of Intensive Intentions is a famous formula by the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933–2005), which describes a living and engaged approach to the history of art and to the making of exhibitions in contemporary art institutions. This approach, dating back to the 1960s–1970s, when the role of the museum in reflecting modernity was once again a matter of debate, takes into account the human factor: the motivations and aspirations of artists, the subjectivity of curatorial choices, and the influence of relationships between all participants of the artistic process, including the public, on shaping the “final” historical narrative. This formula inspired Garage to invite the audience to consider the phenomena and processes in Russian art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and to discuss them in the context of Garage Collection as it comes together.