Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has emerged as a significant and leading voice in the Former East, as it transitioned from presenting projects of international artists in Russia, without a collection, to becoming an institution concerned, not just with the exhibition experience, but with the very formation of contemporary art, in the country.
To discuss Garage and the wider international context, NGV Senior Curator Dr Simon Maidment is joined by writer and publisher Ekaterina Suverina of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and Asian contemporary art researcher Dr Michelle Antoinette of Monash University. Their conversation will pivot around the efforts and approaches that Garage is making in archiving and documenting Russian contemporary art and exhibition histories. Russia’s de-centred position in relation to the traditional art world offers the chance to reflect on the opportunities and responsibilities of the ‘peripheries’. In considering this issue, the speakers will compare and contrast recent historicising efforts in Asia and Australia to those of Garage.
This is a Auslan interpreted program.
Ekaterina Suverina is the coordinator of the international publishing program and Garage Art Book Fair at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow). She is also a co-founder of Public History Laboratory (Moscow) and a lecturer at Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. She holds an MA in Public History (Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences and Manchester University, 2013) and an MA in Cultural Studies (Moscow State University for the Humanities, 2012). Her works have been published in Uroki Istorii (Lessons of History), Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye (New Literary Observer), Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, and other journals.
Dr Michelle Antoinette is Lecturer in Art History and Theory at Monash University Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), Melbourne. She has expertise in modern and contemporary Asian art histories. She is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow (2017–20); her current research project, Asian Art Publics (grant number DE170100455), focuses on new public engagement and participation in Asian art and museums. She is the author of Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990 (2015) and the co-editor (with Caroline Turner) of Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making (2014).
Dr Simon Maidment is Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at NGV, encompassing Australian and International art across both the gallery’s venues. Recent exhibitions and publications as curator, author and editor include group shows the inaugural NGV Triennial and Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes and retrospectives on David Hockney, Julian Opie, Gareth Sansom and David McDiarmid. He is co-editor of a forthcoming NGV publication on Chinese contemporary culture, art and design. His PhD from the Centre for Ideas, VCA, University of Melbourne used curatorial practice as a method to investigate art’s relationship to social and political change.