Spring exhibitions 2019

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow is pleased to announce the opening of its spring programming, featuring a solo exhibition of Russian countercultural icon Pavel Pepperstein, a retrospective of the revolutionary London-based artist Rasheed Araeen, and an experimental group show that interrogates the circulation of knowledge in museums.

Kicking off the Museum’s spring program is a psychedelic solo exhibition by Pavel Pepperstein blending science fiction and space-age conspiracy with Russian folklore and American intrigue. On view from February 28 to June 2, 2019, The Human as a Frame for the Landscape will showcase more than 80 paintings and drawings by the legendary Russian conceptual artist, writer, rapper, musician, and art theorist. Diving deep into Pepperstein’s surreal world of collapsed histories, imagined countries, invented languages, new religions, apocalypses, and doomed cosmonauts, each room of this exhibition is designed as a pod-like chamber in a giant spaceship. Included in the show are several of Pepperstein’s more curious series, including works created from the perspective of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, his watercolor reveries, his world maps covered in colorful wallpaper patterns, his surreal ink illustrations of post-historic landscapes, and his collages.

Pepperstein is among Russia’s most popular contemporary artists. His work was chosen to represent Russia at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and the 26th São Paulo Art Biennial in 2004, among many other international art exhibitions, and was also included the first Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art in 2017. He was born in Moscow in 1966 and introduced to the circle of Moscow Conceptualists, of which his father was a member, as a child. Pepperstein’s work is imbued with the spirits of glasnost and perestroika, which, alongside a healthy dose of hallucinogens, instilled in his work both a sense of nostalgia and a thrilling anarchy. Pepperstein’s work offers a particular perspective on the meaninglessness of progress, and of the future.

From March 8 to May 26, the museum will host Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective, a long-awaited survey covering six decades of the groundbreaking artist’s work as a painter, sculptor, writer, and curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a book of the artist’s texts, their first Russian translation. Trained as an engineer in Pakistan, Araeen (b. 1935) moved to the UK in 1964, where he has lived ever since. The exhibition opens with his work in Karachi, including his early experiments in abstraction. His structures from the mid-1960s onward, produced after his move to London, show Araeen’s pioneering contribution to minimalism. The show then pivots to Araeen’s key political pieces from the 1970s and 1980s. A steadfast proponent of social justice and anti-colonialism, Araeen joined the British Black Panthers in 1972. In 1977, Araeen founded Black Phoenix, the forerunner to Third Text, which became one of the central platforms for the development of postcolonial thought. Included in the exhibition is Reading Room, comprising every copy of Third Text produced under Araeen’s editorship. Following a selection of Araeen’s Cruciform series of the 1980s and 1990s, the exhibition closes with his most recent geometric paintings.

Commemorating this landmark exhibition, Araeen has produced a brand-new Atrium Commission, Homage to Tatlin (1968/2019). This monumental sculpture realizes a work originally envisaged by Araeen in 1968 and fittingly pays tribute to another, similarly unrealized work: Russian avant-gardist Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. Originally planned for Petrograd in 1919, Tatlin’s ambitious work was never erected in full scale. The close of the exhibition will include a performance of Araeen Disco Sailing on a lake in Moscow’s Gorky Park.

Araeen’s most famous curatorial project was The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Britain (1989). In lieu of recreating that seminal 24-person show in Russia, Garage will stage, in its Mezzanine space, A Cultural Atlas (March 8–May 21), a sprawling interactive infographic on the ambitions and contradictions of countless utopian universalist episodes and ideals, created by Vali Mahlouji. This articulate history of the many alternatives to the Western canon provides much-needed context to Araeen’s retrospective.

Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective was first developed for Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and curated by Nick Aikens. Prior to Garage, the show travelled to MAMCO, Geneva, and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

Concurrent with the Rasheed Araeen retrospective is Bureau des transmissions (March 8–May 15, 2019), an experimental series of artists’ interventions suggesting that future museums, like universities, will be organized as campuses, with artists acting as experts and education blurring with social activism to the point that the two are indistinguishable. This exhibition brings together interactive performances, board games, research, and a mask-making master class. The show features a cadre of international and Russian artists investigating the pedagogical capacities of the museum institution. Organized by the Museum’s Education and Exhibition departments, Bureau des transmissions marks the tenth anniversary of educational programming at Garage, an important element of the museum’s mission, alongside its dedication to world-class shows like the Araeen retrospective, and the elevation of artists like Pepperstein, who hail from the period when Russia’s art was all created underground.