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The Garage Journal

No. 03The Museum as a Research Hub

Published September 24, 2021

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    Vlad Strukov

    Editorial. The Museum as a Research Hub

    The museum increasingly recognizes visibility as a power to build associations, networks, and communities. This special issue considers critically how these new powers are invested in curatorial practices and how they are invoked in the contemporary and historical settings. We put the visitors at the center of our consideration, including their participation in the process of re-defining the purpose and scope of research in the museum. The purpose of this intervention is to consider how research is integrated into museums’ future strategies, to reflect on how collaborations among researchers, artists, and curators work, and outline the key applications of practice-based research. In order to address these concerns, the materials selected for the special issue focus on the question of method, which allows a new conceptualization of the museum as a research hub.

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    Livia Nolasco-Rozsas, Yannick Hofmann

    The Museum as a Cognitive System of Human and Non-Human Actors

    The essay introduces a new line of research at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe that examines the role and experiments with museum applications of information technology, specifically artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality technologies (e.g., augmented, mixed, and virtual realities). Currently, two projects at the ZKM have taken up the initiative to start practice-based research: Beyond Matter and intelligent.museum. These projects are discussed in this essay with the aim of demonstrating that the museum is being successively transformed into a cognitive system of human and non-human actors. Drawing on the institutional experience of the ZKM, we present a new approach towards the notion of the museum: one that takes computation into consideration. 

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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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    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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    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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    Joella Q. Kiu

    ‘An Exploratory, Irregular Tendency’: Using Digital Gardens in Curatorial Research

    As we grapple with this pandemic-altered reality, institutions seek for new ways to present curatorial research online. With a focus on considered, attuned, and meaningful ways for presentation, this essay will explore the possibilities afforded by presenting curatorial research through the concept of ‘digital gardens.’ I demonstrate that digital gardens occupy an unusual space between social media feeds and fully formed publications or journal articles. With an emphasis on sampling-ideas and work-in-progress, digital gardens encourage growth whilst expressing a need to be tended. This essay examines how we might lean into the framework of a digital garden in a bid to reify the process-driven and the experimental aspects of curatorial work.

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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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    Tatyana Volkova

    Problems of Archiving Activist Art in Russian Museums

    The article analyzes the problems that contemporary art historians and archivists face when working with activist art. Some of these problems are linked to the issues of archiving contemporary art in general, like the ephemerality and fragility of contemporary art, the difficulty of identifying objects worthy of archiving, the increasing digitalization of art, and others. Based on materials of Garage Archive Collection, the article also examines the problems inherent in the process of archiving activist art as a radical genre. The analysis allows the author to identify three groups of such problems (legal and technical, as well as problems of expert knowledge) and suggest potential ways to solve them.

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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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    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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    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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    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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    Serubiri Moses

    Art after the Epistemic Crisis. On Nkule Mabaso and Nomusa Makhubu’s The Stronger We Become: The South African Pavilion (2019)

    In this essay, the author discusses the reader that accompanied the South African Pavilion at the 58th Venice International Art Biennale—The Stronger We Become: The South African Pavilion (Natal Collective, Newcastle, South Africa, 2019; edited by Nkule Mabaso and Nomusa Makhubu). The author concludes that the book argues for ‘epistemic justice’ and that resilience in art can be understood as positive (resilience through laughter) or negative (resilience through neoliberal absorption).