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  Anastasia Tarasova

  Why Archive? On the Concept and History of Garage Archive Collection

  Over the last twenty-five years, the importance of documentation in new art and museum practices, the convergence of archival and museum activities, the ‘interpenetration’ of the archive and contemporary art have been rigorously discussed by researchers. However, when it comes to research published in Russian, there have been virtually no studies based on local cases and little analysis of the international experience in this field. This article outlines the history and structure, as well as the rationale behind Garage Archive Collection, and contextualizes this collection within the global practices of building similar collections and of shaping current forms of work aimed at preserving the history of contemporary art in museums. As an attempt at self-reflection, the author's observations are based on the personal experience of creating and storing an archive in the Research Department of the museum, as well as of studying the practices of other cultural institutions as part of this activity.

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  Alexey Voronkov

  Tactics and Strategies: A Response of Contemporary Art Institutions in Russia to Restrictive Measures during the COVID-19 Pandemic

  The article presents the results of a study on contemporary art institutions in Russia. The subject of the research is the response of these institutions to the restrictive measures imposed in March–October 2020 in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The study suggests a sociological interpretation of the changes that have taken place in the work of the organizations in question. While the negative impact of the pandemic on cultural institutions is rather widely researched in the professional context and does not require an outsider’s perspective, this study focuses on the consequences which are viewed as unexpected even by practitioners themselves and which practitioners characterize as positive. These consequences are approached as new forms of sociality interpreted within the framework of Michel Foucault's theory of power and Michel de Certeau’s concepts of tactics and strategies.

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  Maria Shchekochikhina

  Inclusion Studies and Their Impact on the Strategies for Developing Inclusion Programs in Art Institutions

  The article analyzes the strategies for developing the inclusion programs applied at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. The analysis is contextualized within the frameworks of global movements for the rights of people with disabilities, and of the inclusion programs implemented in Russian cultural institutions. These development strategies have emerged as a result of the academic discourse and museum staff’s practical activities influencing each other; therefore, the article presents an in-depth analysis of the transformations which the concept of ‘inclusion’ has undergone and the related changes in the inclusion programs at Garage. It also describes how activities of various structural units of the museum crisscross in the process of implementing public programs that go beyond the usual understanding of inclusion. The paper presents the results of the museum's research projects aimed at developing a relevant definition of inclusion and new vectors for promoting inclusion programs in cultural contexts.

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  Michal Ron

  ‘MUSEUM/enfants non admis’: Arriving Late to Marcel Broodthaers

  In 1968 the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers inaugurated the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles at his home in Brussels, with the Section XIXème siècle. In 1972 Broodthaers closed his Museum at documenta V with the Musée d’Art Ancien, Département des Aigles, Gallery du XXe siècle. The art historical discourse framed the fictitious Museum project as institutional critique. My essay shifts the focus to the historical critique embedded in Broodthaers’s Museum by introducing an analytical meditation on the project’s temporality. Following the artist’s references to a large span of historical periods in the Museum’s Sections, my essay claims that they demonstrated disjointed temporalities. The Museum, temporal and ephemeral, was anchored in its present time, and left very little material traces.

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  Svetlana Kondratyeva

  Dancing with Heritage: Site-Specific Dance and Performance in Historic Sites and Museums

  The article focuses on site-specific dance and performance on historic sites and in museums linked to heritage, as well as on the aspects which such dance and performance work with: memory, commemoration, interpretation, architectural value, etc. The first part of the paper is devoted to the phenomenon of performativity in humanities and to the concept of ‘heritage as performance’ that is shaped by this phenomenon. In the second part of the paper this concept is elaborated on and expanded with the help of artistic performative practices such as a promenade wearing headphones, site-specific dance, and performance art. Finally, based on the example of site-specific performances, the article demonstrates the primary strategies that are applied by the authors and describes the characteristic features of those strategies. The question addressed here is how dance is used to work with heritage and how heritage is used to create dance.

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  Ken Arnold, Adam Bencard, Karin Tybjerg, Louise Whiteley

  Museum as Academy: Research Practices at Copenhagen’s Medical Museion

  Museums have always supported learning and inquiry, but the last twenty years have seen a flourishing of reinvented university museums, following a period of neglect. This paper is grounded in the case of Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, which experiments with relations between research and museum practice. The authors draw on multiple thinkers to build an image of a ‘museum method’ that invites playful circling, imaginative leaps, boundary-crossing, and serendipitous collaborations centered on encounters between objects and diverse visitors.

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  Anna Kan

  Re-exposition as a Medium: Political Action in the Museum

  The history and culture museum complex in the Sestroretsk area of Razliv has been faced with the need to carry out a re-exposition in its Shalash pavilion. The task at hand entails creating an exhibition project that would be in line with the current cultural trends and would meet the needs of society. The article discusses theoretical aspects of carrying out re-expositions, as well as the implementation of the latter in the Shalash museum within the contexts of Soviet history and contemporaneity. The article approaches the re-exposition as a museum medium capable of shedding light on the essence of the Lenin museums, on the mechanisms of transmission and impact of propaganda, as well as on the long-terms effects of those mechanisms observed in post-Soviet spaces.

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  Mateusz Sapija

  Conceptualizing Exhibitions as Sociopolitical Research: An Analysis of European Exhibition Practices of the 1990s

  This article examines the role of contemporary art exhibitions in the process of the political integration of Europe between the Cold War’s end and the European Union’s Eastern Enlargement. To do so, it analyzes a range of inter-European exhibitions that aimed to construct and disseminate a new notion of a ‘united’ European art world. These exhibition projects intended either to ‘bring together’ artists from the former East and West, so as to break the dichotomies of their distinct sociopolitical roots, or to conduct major surveys on Eastern European art, aiming to legitimize art from the region and place it into a universal cultural context. 

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  Marina Romanova

  Experiments during the Pandemic: Online Mediation for the Exhibition 'Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture. 1966-1985' at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

  The format of art mediation has been gaining momentum among Russian cultural institutions since 2014, when Manifesta 10 took place in Saint Petersburg. This was when, for the first time in Russian practice, an art institution sought assistance from mediators for interacting with visitors. This article focuses on the ways in which the format of art mediation has moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the example of the online mediation for the exhibition Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture. 1966-1985, which took place at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the author analyzes whether this format has proved to be popular with the audience and whether working online has made the museum aware of its visitors’ new needs.

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  Jeffrey Taylor, Kelsey Sloane

  Art Markets without Art, Art without Objects

  The art world was already experiencing a profound crisis before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the discourse until that point had largely focused more on the hopelessness of the situation, rather than the possibility for meaningful change. The massive market disruption caused by the virus outbreak created an immediate shift away from consumption of physical objects both into the digital realm of social media and virtual, participatory art experiences and beyond traditional gallery walls into outdoor art venues. A liquid consumption model has emerged in new models such as NFTs that function like unique objects for digital artworks. Successful strategies have become part of a paradigm shift in art consumption by prioritizing the non-ownership of non-canonical non-objects. Certain organizations’ methodologies, such as sculpture parks and public art, have been in practice for decades, but have come into focus during this time of change. This study seeks to reveal the surging growth of this new model through an analysis of the new valuation of non-objects over the last year especially, from liquid consumption and the surge of NFTs to experiential consumption and the value of space.

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  Angelos Theocharis

  Going Online, Going Global: The Pandemic Meetings of a Russophone Book Club

  The Waterstones Russian Book Club (WRBC) is the largest Russophone book club in Britain. In the pre-pandemic era, the book club members used to meet once per month at the Waterstones Piccadilly to discuss contemporary Russian literature, but following the announcement of the lockdown in Britain in March 2020, they decided to go online for the first time. This article explores the transition of the WRBC from an offline to an online setting, as well as its effect on the mission of the book club and the members’ reading identities. Drawing on interviews with participants and online observations, I argue that the digital practices introduced during the pandemic led to the formation of a hybrid shared reading paradigm, enhanced the transnational character of the WRBC, and laid the foundations for the creation of a global Russophone reading community.

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  Boris Chukhovich

  The Aesthetics of ‘the Pre-Raphaelites of Samarkand’: From the Androgyny Theme to the Homoerotic Narrative

  The article analyzes the themes of the works by the artists from Daniil Stepanov’s circle, who met in Samarkand in the early 1920s and are called by the author ‘the Pre-Raphaelites of Samarkand’. In the beginning, in 1921 and 1922, the artworks of several members of the circle –– Stepanov himself, as well as Alexei Iusupov and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin –– demonstrated an interest in androgyny which, in the context of Central Asia, was frequently associated with adolescent male dancers giving performances dressed as women. Later on, this theme transformed in the ‘Samarkand series’ by one of the circle members, painter and printmaker Alexander Nikolayev (Usto Mumin), into a cohesive homoerotic plot telling, scene by scene, the story of two young men from the ‘bacha bazi’ subculture who meet, fall in love and marry each other. According to the author’s hypothesis, the story was based not on a literary or religious plot, but on a specific life experience.

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  Evgeniya Kiseleva

  Less is More. Limited Perceptual Abilities in ‘Aesthetics of Emotions’ Artworks

  Art working with the topic of boundaries and limitations mostly falls within the category of socio-cultural practices. The experiences of temporary blindness, color blindness, impaired bodily sensations, and other limitations and changes of perceptual abilities in works by contemporary artists are viewed in this article not as an integration technology, but as an artistic device and a method of contemporary art. The author explores the relation of the term ‘inclusive art’ to the existing notions of art brut, disability art, and outsider art, and offers a typology of artworks focusing on limited or changed perceptual abilities, even if the impetus for their creation had nothing to do with the inclusion of socially excluded groups in society and culture. By examining exhibitions and individual artworks, the author analyzes the relation of the limitations trend to the concepts of ‘aesthetics of emotions’, ‘haptic aesthetics’, and ‘empirical turn’ in contemporary art.

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  Charles R. Garoian

  Performing the Museum

  This article characterizes the relationship between the museum and its visitors as a dialogic process that enables a play between the public narratives of the museum and the private narratives of the viewers. The museum is presented as a performative site where its dominant socially and historically constructed pedagogy engages in a critical dialogue with the viewer's memories and cultural histories. Five pedagogical strategies are provided to comprise a critical performative pedagogy in museums: performing perception, autobiography, museum culture, interdisciplinarity, and performing the institution. These strategies represent a comprehensive museum pedagogy that enables visitors to experience and understand the museum's collections and exhibitions from their respective cultural perspectives.

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  Cüneyt Çakırlar

  Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016)

  This study critically analyzes representations of the queer migrant subject in two documentaries, A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016). Both films construct a drama of conflicting intersections between religion, national belonging, and sexual identity, which is resolved through a normative pull towards home and its affective restructuring of intimacy in the context of queer migrant subjectivity. The ameliorative status of homecoming operates as a default resolution in these films. A longing for home is that which both films register as the queer migrant’s constitutive attachment. These documentaries’ (re)domestication of the queer subject seems to promote a neoliberal identity politics of sexual humanitarianism, in which collective struggles are occluded by individual, heroic testimonials of homecoming.

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  Sela Kodjo Adjei

  Abstraction and the Sublime in Art: Bridging the Gap between ‘Modern Art’ and Ewe Vodu Aesthetics

  This paper examines the contributions of African art to the rise of global modernism in art. The concept of ‘modernism’ in art history remains inordinately attributed to Western male artists, and often ignores the creative contributions of African women in indigenous communities. These academic lapses highlight the need for more critical research, analysis, and documentation. The paper includes a photographic presentation that captures the creative practice of Ewe artists in South Eastern Ghana. These photographs are the outcome of a collaborative research process and serve as supporting visual ethnography for a discussion of several recurring issues and debates in African art scholarship.

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  Maria Shchekochikhina

  Understanding and Implementing Inclusion in Russian Museums

  The article focuses on the specificities of understanding inclusion in Russian museums by examining two exhibitions: Co-thinkers (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016) and The Art of Being (National Centre for Contemporary Art, 2019), as well as the projects followed these exhibitions. It discusses the key concepts of inclusion, looks at the origins of introducing the notion of inclusion into the field of museum discussions, explores the influence of different concepts of inclusion on the inclusive practices of Russian museums. Relying on international experience, the article conducts a comparative analysis of the approaches to understanding inclusion by the two cultural institutions analyzed. The analysis systematizes the existing practices and shows that, to date, Russian museums have not yet come to a shared understanding of inclusion. As a result, museum workers are faced with the necessity to choose the direction of inclusive programs and their positioning.

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  Sven Christian

  Access and Preservation in the Digital Age: The Case of Dumile Feni’s Scroll

  Today, museums around the world face long-standing issues of access, representation, and inclusivity. Although many look to open their doors to broader audiences, to reap the presumed benefits of the digital sphere, and to expand their collections to embrace a plurality of perspectives, far less attention has been paid to how institutions include and represent artists. This article highlights how the drive for accessibility, an espousal of the promise of new technologies, and the need to preserve artworks might motivate curatorial choices that strip them of their material and contextual idiosyncrasies. It focuses on a scroll created by the artist Dumile Feni, and its exhibition and digitization for Activate/Captivate (2016) at Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg.