ART-PRESENTATION: Garage Museum 10th Anniversary
On 12/6/2008 Garage Museum of Contemporary Art opened its gates with the site specific installation “Pulse Spiral” by Rafael Lozano Hemmer, a three-dimensional spiral paraboloid made up of 400 light bulbs arranged according to Pierre De Fermat’s 17th-century equation to explain the most efficient spatial distribution of objects on a surface.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Archive
In 2018, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art celebrates its 10th anniversary. To mark this important date, theMuseum organized a wide range of events: a special program of exhibitions that demonstrates the diversity of the Museum’s activities, congratulations from artists and our friends, and, of course, a party to which you are all invited. At first the Museum presents the first reconstruction of “Atom” (1967/2018), a monumental kinetic work by Viacheslav Koleichuk, a key figure in Russian kinetic art. The thirteen-meter-high structure was originally commissioned by the Kurchatov Institute of Nuclear Energy and built in 1967 for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. The construction was deceptively simple at first glance, but combined complex approaches to the creation of form that would later define Koleichuk’s oeuvre. Made of hundreds of metal tubes, the sphere is set in motion by the wind, held together by the tensions of its constituent parts. Light reflected by the sun, or colored projections at night, triggers myriad forms and shapes, activating the space around the structure. Initiated at a time when official Soviet organizations were interested in collaborating with artists to integrate art into the life of the city, the sculpture was initially constructed on the square in front of the institute by the then twenty-six-year-old artist, in collaboration with his wife, Marina Koleichuk, and engineer Gennady Rykunov. Working closely with the artist for the reconstruction at Garage, the core team has been joined by Nikolay Khrust, who has produced a new score in collaboration with Koleichuk to replace the lost original composition by Leon Theremin. The new composition is partly played on an ovaloid, one of the many musical instruments Koleichuk has invented during his lifetime. It is synched with the light projections to produce an even more cosmic effect. “Infinite Ear” is an exhibition of hearing situations that has been derived from an ongoing series of international workshops and dialogues with deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Developed in Moscow as part of Garage’s Field Research Program, the artists and curators explored various connections between society’s understanding of deafness and multiple dimensions of Russian cultural history. The exhibition presents a unique sonic space where the public are invited to hear, feel, understand, dream, and play sound in a way they have never encountered before. In this project, sound ceases to be an exclusively physical notion that can be measured by an audiogram and becomes an artistic value with limitless interpretations. The experience includes “WITHIN”, a display of instruments by Tarek Atoui, played during concerts and workshops, and a project by Alison O’Daniel composed of sculptures and a video series. To amplify the central exhibition thesis, that each person has their own way to perceive sound through vibration, body movement, sign language, images, and fiction, an experimental mediation will be established by the artists Lendl Barcelos, Valentina Desideri and Myriam Lefkowitz. The exhibition “Dear Visitors…” celebrates the key participant in all Museum’s programs: the museum visitor. It features new works created using audience data.Since it opened, Garage has communicated with visitors through invigilators, guides and mediators, guestbooks, and polls. Each part of the exhibition is based on one of these sources of information. In the Glass Room, Russian artist Ekaterina Muromtseva creates a total installation drawing on over 40 guestbooks containing both dry, critical, elaborate, and poetic reviews of past exhibitions. Based on her analysis, Muromtseva has defined several types of visitors, whose character will be reflected in a number of art objects. A collective project based on Museum polls, is presented on the Mezzanine. Using infographics and other visual media, the team created a sociological portrait of the visitor, which will evolve as the Museum grows. The collective Theatre of Mutual Operations (Lyosha Lobanov, Ksenia Peretrukhina, Shifra Kazhdan and Alexandra Mun), and playwright Natasha Borenko stage a new project based on dozens of interviews with Garage staff, in which invigilators, guides, and security officers were asked to talk about their strangest interactions with visitors. The first project to be shown in the Museum’s cloakroom, consists of two parts: an interactive installation and performances reconstructing some of the curious episodes that have taken place at Garage.
Info: Curators: Snejana Krasteva (Atom), Council, Anastasia Mityushina and Iaroslav Volovod (Infinite Ear), Andrey Misiano (Dear Visitors…), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 9/32 Krymsky Val, 119049, Moscow, Duration: 6/5-26/8/18 (Atom) and 8/6-2/9/18 (Infinite Ear & Dear Visitors…), Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-22:00, https://garagemca.org
