2019 programming with special emphasis on ecology and the environment

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow is pleased to announce highlights from its programming for 2019, a characteristically ambitious slate that merges Russian history with cutting-edge international art, and highlights overlooked stars from art history. Next year will also feature the museum’s first engagement with ecological issues.

The year begins with an exhibition by Russian artist, writer, musician, and art theorist Pavel Pepperstein (February 21-June 2). Introduced to the circle of Moscow Conceptualists as a child, Pepperstein has been one of the most prolific mythmakers in Russian contemporary art throughout his career. He is an inventor of systems, universes, languages, cities, and political projects. Pepperstein’s solo exhibition at Garage reviews the key myths he has created since the 1970s: from imaginary countries for which he has developed detailed maps and national symbols to visions of the future that range from the ecstatic to the ultra-logical; from religions, cults, beliefs, and rituals to alternate realities that exist in parallel dimensions and modalities. The exhibition will feature approximately eighty works spanning the artist’s career from both public and private collections, as well as material from Pepperstein’s personal archive and Garage Archive Collection.

The spring will also see the museum host a landmark retrospective of Rasheed Araeen (March 8-May 26). Araeen (b.1935) trained as an engineer in Pakistan before moving to the UK, where he began his artistic career in 1964. This first comprehensive survey of his work will span six decades, revealing the scope of Araeen’s expanded artistic practice, from his early experiments in painting in Karachi and his groundbreaking Minimalist sculptures in London, both of which predate American Minimalism, to his key political pieces from the 1970s and 1980s. (In 1972 he joined the Black Panthers, and has been a prominent promoter of postcolonial voices within the former British Empire.) The show will also feature his editorial and curatorial projects, and a selection of his new geometric paintings and wall structures, which have brought him recent acclaim at Documenta and the Venice Biennale. Araeen will also develop an Atrium Commission specifically for Garage, producing for the first time a sculpture he envisaged in 1968. The sculpture will pay tribute to the avant-gardist Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, which was planned for St. Petersburg in 1917 as a Socialist answer to the Eiffel Tower but never erected in full scale.

The Puerto Rico-based duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla will present their first major solo project in Russia as a Garage Square Commission (May 26-December 1), just outside the museum in Gorky Park. Allora & Calzadilla’s Commission ties in with a show that will run around the same time, The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100 (June 28-December 1), the first exhibition of its kind in Russia to explore important issues around environmentalism and ecology through the language of visual arts, science, technology, and activism.

The exhibition’s title alludes to a time period in the future when, certain authors have theorized, the planet’s oil and water resources have been depleted, but humanity has yet to colonise other planets. In this speculative era, the human race would be forced to live with the knowledge that we are stuck on a dying Earth with no planet B. Thus the show points to a future that is already in the making, when the environmental agenda becomes the main political question.

The Coming World will bring together existing works and new commissions from more than fifty artists and visionaries. It will open with Purple, an immersive six-channel video installation by John Akomfrah and include a new Garage Atrium Commission by Huang Yong Ping. The museum’s 2019 Garage Live program will present a series of events specially conceived for The Coming World.

In addition to its function as a world-class contemporary art institution, Garage is also a research facility, an art incubator, and a pedagogical experiment. This last aspect of Garage’s mission comes to the fore in two more upcoming shows. First, there’s the ninth iteration of the museum’s Art Experiment series (January 2-13, 2019), which is titled The Miracle of Light, and celebrates the 180th anniversary of the invention of photography. It’s a quest through the museum that teaches techniques for creating images using light such as  camera obscura, pinhole cameras, photograms, cyanotypes, and freezelight photography. Then there’s Bureau des transmissions (March 8-May 12, 2019), which was developed jointly by the Museum’s curatorial and educational teams, and focuses on the production and circulation of knowledge in a museum setting. It will include both Russian and international participants.

And Garage has much more to announce in 2019. The museum will expand its Archive Summer Program, which invites researchers from around the world to work in its Archive Collection of contemporary Russian art history. Expect announcements of the seventh international conference, which will explore the cultural and institutional landscape of the space once known as post-Soviet, news about inclusive programming on the migrant experience in museums, and the launch of a new studio and residency program—Garage Studios.

John Akomfrah’s Purple was commissioned by the Barbican, London and co-commissioned by Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden, TBA21-Academy, The Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow