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Spring Season at Garage Musem
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Garage Museum of Contemporary Art 
 Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has embarked on the largest-ever survey of art practice across Russia in preparation for the first Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. Presenting works made by more than 60 artists from across the country, the exhibition captures the zeitgeist of some of the most active and influential figures of the past five years, offering insight into the diversity of social tendencies that constitute the underexplored Russian art scene.
Over the last year, a curatorial team of six has traveled through the country’s eight federal districts, visiting more than 40 cities and towns from the Pacific to the Arctic oceans, crossing eleven time zones, in climates that range from the subtropical to subarctic. Geographically the largest country in the world—it takes eleven hours to fly from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok—Russia is also culturally vast, encompassing more than 200 nationalities and over 100 minority languages. Physically bordering both European and Asian territories, three quarters of the landmass is officially in Asia, but only one fifth of the country’s 146.5 million population lives there. From this research, they identified seven vectors — Master Figure, Personal Mythologies, Fidelity to Place, Common Language, Art in Action, Street Morphology, and Local Histories of Art—through which the current art life of the country can be broadly understood. These tendencies range from a strong identification with urban and natural environments and a drive to create elaborate mythological worlds, to the use of art practice as activism, or as a mechanism to participate in international discourse. Often isolated and working in the absence of established cultural infrastructure, what unites the widely different artists selected for the exhibition is a sense of resourcefulness and a powerful belief in art as a way of life.
 Irina Korina. The Tail Wags the Comet
Irina Korina has produced a three-story architectural intervention for Garage Atrium space that physically and ideologically transports audiences into different surroundings. Referencing the distinctively eclectic urban landscape of Moscow that is populated with temporary structures, fake edifices, and buildings undergoing reinvention, Korina—who trained as a set designer before studying art—has created an immersive environment that invites visitors to discover the “secrets” of what lies behind a sequence of incongruous, yet familiar facades. Using quotidian construction materials such as brightly-colored tent cloth, roofing tiles, galvanized metal, wood and paper as well as various scents, The Tail Wags the Comet lives up to the absurdity inherent in its name, through witty navigation tactics and intricate detail that at once disorients and entices the viewer as they embark on an alternative route from the entrance of the museum to the exhibition spaces on the first floor, or vice versa.
Opened in conjunction with the first Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, the Atrium Commission explores the contradictions, humor, and pathos of national and cultural identity. In describing the concept of The Tail Wags the Comet—the largest work the artist has made to date—Korina says: “It is about the frustration of longing for something you will never see or achieve and the notion of a desired future that is met with nothing but mundane reality.”
Ugo Rondinone. your age and my age and the age of the rainbow
The artist’s first project in Russia consists of two interconnected pieces: an installation in front of the Museum, and an object on its rooftop. In Garage Square, visitors find a one-hundred-meter-long fence supporting thousands of images of rainbows painted on wood panels by kids with various disabilities from all over the country. Garage Rooftop also hosts a ten-meter-long rainbow that spells out OUR MAGIC HOUR. This message celebrates the inauguration of the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, which is taking place simultaneously inside the Museum. Having emerged in Rondinone's work in 1997, first as a sculpture for a public space, the rainbow has since become one of his most recognizable images, a convergence of visual and poetic energies—according to the artist, each rainbow represents a complete work of poetry.
 When Rondinone made site visits to Moscow, he determined that public engagement would be one of the key aspects of the new work, as well as wanting to produce something that was responsive to the context of Garage. Acknowledging the Museum’s interest in developing country wide networks, he asked that his project should be far-reaching. Assisted by Garage’s Inclusive Program department, the artist engaged 1,500 children, including deaf and hard of hearing kids, as well as children with physical and developmental disabilities, in nine cities across Russia: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ivanovo, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Perm, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, and Novosibirsk. Fifteen hundred panels of different sizes, from 40 x 30 cm to 125 x 80 cm, are displayed on the front and back of the fence. Rondinone has realized a number of communal works, but this is his largest and longest rainbow fence to date. Unlike the previous ones, it is the first to be exhibited outside a museum, accessible to park visitors.
Each participant was invited to create a drawing for the installation on the Square with the promise that there would be no curatorial intervention and every rainbow produced would be presented. In a time of divisions and restrictions all over the world, Rondinone’s ethical standpoint, and his openness and generosity, restores a belief in the magic of the moment and the human essence of contemporary art.
Schedule:
March 10 - May 14. Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art
March 10 - May 21. Ugo Rondinone. your age and my age and the age of the rainbow
March 10 - August 6. Irina Korina. The Tail Wags the Comet
More info
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