Spring 2021 exhibitions

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to present its slate of spring exhibitions, all of which opened late last month. 

Conceived in the earliest days of self-isolation, the lead exhibition Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene is driven by a humanitarian mission to help the arts community, but also aims to produce and show works that explore the vast and intriguing territory of artistic speculation. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a point of external reference, Garage invited artists and artist groups living and working in Russia to assume any distance from the current situation that they liked, and envision speculation as a way of interacting with reality. 

Garage received over 1,000 applications, and from these chose 33 participants, including 11 group projects. The works on display address not only the future but also possible versions of the past or present. They interpret “speculation” in an extremely broad way, from the figure of the profiteer to secret societies, from alternative medicine to technology startups, from trickster investigations and parafictions to imaginary museums. These hypothetical worlds consider alternative economies, biopolitics, conspiracy theories, new forms of employment and social interaction, and systems of control.

Artists for Assuming Distance include Fedora Akimova; APXIV; Vitaly Barabanov; Chto Delat; Tatiana Efrussi; Anna Fobia; Genda Fluid; Andrey Guryanov and Anton Kuryshev; Marina Istomina; Kafe-Morozhenoe media activist collective; Marina Karpova, Maria Morina, and Katerina Sokolovskaya; Khochesh Group; Vladislav Kruchinsky; Mikhail Maksimov; MishMash Group; NONSNS hybrid self-organized group; Daria Pravda; Kirill Savchenkov; Nikita Seleznev; Ivan Seriy; Alyona Shapovalova and Alisa Smorodina; Alexander Shchurenkov; Andrey Shental; Boris Shershenkov; ShShSh self-organized group; Maxim Spivakov; Techno-Poetry Cooperative; Theater of Mutual Operations collective; Dasha Trofimova; Maxim Trulov and Ksyusha Lastochka; Zaur Tsugaev; Asya Volodina; Mitya Zilberstein.

As part of the Garage Live program, visitors will have the opportunity to see the immersive performance The University of Birds by Theater of Mutual Operations, a video vaudeville featuring elements of group therapy and a concert by Techno-Poetry Cooperative, and YouTube shows by the group NONSNS. Assuming Distance is curated by Ekaterina Lazareva, Ekaterina Savchenko, and Iaroslav Volovod. 

Opening concurrently, Present Continuous draws from the Garage Archive Collection, unearthing the hidden history of unrealized projects, artistic and architectural, across Russia. These include documentary recreations of a proposal for a dance hall in Moscow’s Gorky Park by architect Igor Pyatkin, and a concept for a light-and-sound installation on Red Square as imagined by Francisco Infante-Arana, the Russian-Spanish land and kinetic artist. This archival show is curated by Katya Inozemtseva and Sasha Obukhova, with Tonya Trubitsina. 

Finally, the acclaimed Belgian artist David Claerbout marks his first solo exhibition in Russia with David Claerbout: Unseen Sound. The four video works on display explore the areas left outside the camera’s frame—spaces as attractive as they are unreachable—ranging from a street volleyball game in China to a rooftop football field in Algiers, locales ever more desirable for those still housebound. 

Spanning a period of 10 years, these pieces reflect aspects of Claerbout’s so-called “dark optics,” a concept he uses to describe the contemporary state of the image. Dark optics argues that today, as in the pre-photographic age of the 1850s, skilled craftspeople produce and manipulate reality while the public increasingly distrusts the documentary veracity of any given image. Unseen Sound will remain on view until May 2 and is curated by Valentin Diaconov. 

A virtual walkthrough of the shows is available here. We hope to see you in Moscow soon, and that you remain safe and healthy until then.