Edited by Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds), in consultation with Alexandra Philippovskaya (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art)
What is the role of collaborative research in contemporary museum practice? How can an art institution support research in the arts and humanities? These are some of the questions that were sent to a panel of interlocutors—among them multi-disciplinary researchers, curators, and art managers. Their responses are presented in the form of a discourse about contemporary art institutions and research; its focus is on how art institutions can generate knowledge, support research, and build inclusive environments. Offering insights from different contexts, experiences, and disciplines, their discussion serves as a manifesto for research in the museum in general, and in The Garage Journal in particular.
Specially commissioned research-based artwork.
Screen recording (duration: 7'48'') and e-mail subscription service.
Access and inclusion are catch phrases in the contemporary art world. However, the structures of that world are often hierarchical and restrictive. Meriç Algün’s Dear Artist, (2020) explores these concerns through an epistemological collage consisting of invitations to various projects e-mailed to the artist in recent years. Do these invitations offer a possibility of genuine engagement? Or do they manipulate artists? Dear Artist, reconstructs the artist’s experience in the form of a video and and an e-mail subscription service. They can be experienced individually, or in combination, in order to achieve a greater effect. The artwork was developed in collaboration with the curator Vlad Strukov, and a reflection on Algün’s experience, presented as a conversation with Vlad, can be found in the PDF.
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.
The experience of the exhibitions Moscow–Paris, 1900–1930 (the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 1981), The Territory of Art and Atelier (the State Russian Museum, 1990), curated by Pontus Hultén, is addressed in this essay in relation to the context of the most recent developments in museology, to a large extent shaped by Claire Bishop’s book Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2014). The author points out that the social engagement of the contemporary museum depends on the temporality of its audience, which is noticeable when considering examples of the Russian curatorial practice from 1990 to 2010. The function of the museum, the author argues, is not only to serve today’s interests of social groups, being the ‘meeting’ point of artists and the public, but also consciously to transform the present, working mainly with the artistic potential, that is, with the creative energy of the time accumulated in artworks, as it was done by Pontus Hultén in the exhibition Moscow–Paris.
Can one consider the contemporary museum to be purely a space for the preservation, protection, and transmission of cultural heritage? What role do visitors play within the museum? How is the transmission of the heritage possible in the context of a constant reproduction by the museum of the distance between the ‘masterpieces’ and the public? This visual essay analyzes the relationships between the museum and its visitors. Their inclusion in the museum process—or exclusion from it—is demonstrated by means of visitor books of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Audience reactions to Garage exhibitions uncover a way of interaction between the visitors and the museum that is different from the one advocated by classic museology. Instead of the distance that protects the museum from the ‘ignorance’ of its audience and allows for the transmission of knowledge in a monologic form, we can see an example of participatory communication—a form of communication which allows the museum to reflect on its own activities, thus taking a more open and dialogical position in relation to its visitors.
This discussion focuses on disability art, its interconnection with disability rights and the equal opportunities movement, the aesthetic parameters of this area of art, as well as the issues of self-identification of disabled artists. Through a phenomenon that is new for the Russian context — disability art — the discussion systematizes such notions as ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’. The material is based on the discussion that took place in 2020 in the format of a closed meeting between Russian and foreign specialists in the topic’s theoretical and practical aspects.
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.
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.
The essay reflects on the development of new social roles and, as a result, new identity aspects by deaf visitors of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, in the period from 2016 to 2020. Based on her personal experience of working in the inclusion department of Garage and on unstructured interviews with deaf individuals, the author analyzes the process of rethinking deafness as the key factor that shapes their identity. By examining a series of examples of deaf people acquiring new social roles within the art institution, she looks for interconnections with their personal sense of self.
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.
Against the backdrop of a global outcry and the battle against systemic racism, this essay examines the role of whiteness—as an idea, rather than as a racial category—in the maintenance of an acculturated system of power. I argue that race and racism are not the root of the problem but the symptom, and that the deeper issue resides in the inhumanity of institutions: in this case, the institution and culture of art, its values, its manifest self-regard, its exclusionary and controlling force. Through an examination of works by the artist Russell Bruns, I consider how, within the physical and ideological skin of whiteness, this malevolent project is challenged.
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.
In 2012, the Dutch artist Renzo Martens founded the Institute for Human Activities (IHA), which, since 2014, he has developed in collaboration with the cooperative Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) on a former palm oil plantation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through the IHA, Martens has sought to analyze global mechanisms of power, resource and value extraction. At present, the impact of ‘critical’ art, largely produced and consumed in global cities, remains, in Martens’s view, highly limited. The institute has brought the position of plantation workers within global value chains—as well as their place in the history of modern and contemporary art—into sharp focus. Through their activities and artistic practices, Martens and the CATPC seek to revisit the history of the global art system and to intervene in its contemporary structure.
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.
There have been a number of exhibitions in the last five years that have explored queer themes and adopted queer approaches, yet the position of queer in museums remains precarious. This article explores the challenges of this museological landscape and the transformative potential of queer curating through two projects: Queer British Art, 1861—1967 (Tate Britain, April–September 2017) and Being Human (September 2019–present). Drawing on my experience of curating these projects, I consider their successes and limitations, particularly with regards to intersectionality, and the different ways in which queerness shaped their conceptual frameworks; from queer readings in Queer British Art to the explicit rejection of ‘normal’ in Being Human.
Queer art in Russia is not a well-defined movement with striking protagonists, clear manifestos, and paradigmatic works. The queer theme in the local art context is represented in the form of a ‘twinkling’ image and, with rare exceptions, reflected in scattered works and texts by individual artists. What allows a researcher to define these artworks as queer works? What understanding of ‘queer’ should art historians rely on, considering the instability of the concept and its slipping away from any clear-cut definitions? This visual essay analyzes not so much the works themselves, but documents associated with them, available in the archive of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. They outline various themes in the history of post-war Russian art and provide grounds for ‘queering’ it, with regard to a particular research angle and arguments, examples of which are also presented and discussed by the authors of the essay.
In recent years, the issues of inclusion and accessibility have been among the most relevant topics discussed within museum communities. The methods of working with different groups of visitors have come a long way: from the introduction of sporadic practices to the institutionalization of the sphere. The creation in museums of specialized departments, the increase in relevant events, and, as a result, the accumulation of the relevant experience have resulted in a range of methodological guides, summarizing and reflecting upon the acquired knowledge and skills. This review examines the key handbooks and guides that have been published over the last 10 years and are devoted primarily to working with visitors with disabilities. The authors of these guides not only offer a systemic discussion of physical, social, psychological, and other barriers to museum access, but also describe the most effective ways of overcoming them. In further discussions of museum inclusion, one should expect a differentiation of approaches and a deeper reflection, including the usage of external audit and assessment.
