Garage Center for Contemporary Culture presents Exhibition #5: the first and largest survey of contemporary, self-taught art in Russia today.

Exhibition #5 is the culmination of a summer-long journey in 2012, during which The Museum of Everything created a mobile gallery to search for new artists in Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Participants were documented, photographed and filmed as part of the project, with local exhibitions held in all of the cities visited.

Designed and curated by The Museum of Everything, the installation in Gorky Park features new and re-discovered artists, elderly, amateur and homeless artists, and artists with learning and physical disabilities.

Exhibition #5 will also feature historic self-taught artists, including Pavel Leonov and Alexander Lobanov. T

Short films of The Museum of Everything journey are available to see at www.musevery.ru. An illustrated catalogue of the project is available at the exhibition and features written texts by participants in the project, as well as essays by Leonid Tischkov, Jean-Hubert Martin with a foreword by Dasha Zhukova.

Monday – Thursday: 11:00 – 21:00
(last admission 20:30)

Friday – Sunday: 11:00 – 22:00
(last admission 21:30)

This exhibition consists of works with an ambivalent visual nature: each of them permitting dual, conflicting interpretations. The viewer is invited to confront the exhibits in a test of confidence and ponder, for instance, whether we should regard an ultra- realistic image as a harmless trick, if the laws of one-point perspective correspond to the natural conditions of human perception, or if it’s possible to encode an image into text. Is it within the artist’s power to capture something transcendent, lying beyond human experience? These and other subjects will be examined in the fourteen thematic sections of the display, devoted to the visual ontology and visual rhetoric of contemporary art. Each section will also include special items — optical devices, scientific images and artifacts, — meant to act as benchmarks of authenticity, as well as to extend the scope of the viewer’s retinal impressions.

Among the featured artists are AES+F group, Nikita Alekseev, Sergey Bratkov, Ivan Chuikov, Francisco Infante, Georgy Kiesewalter, Vyacheslav Koleichuk, Elena Kovylina, Alexander Labas, Igor Makarevich, Taus Makhacheva, Rauf Mamedov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Irina Nakhova, Ilya Kabakov, Alexey Kallima, Dmitri Prigov, George Pusenkoff, Alexander Rodchenko, Aidan Salakhova, Yuri Shabelnikov, Sergey Shutov, Leonid Sokov, Rostan Tavasiev, Dmitry Tsvetkov, Oleg Vasiliev.

The display also includes works created by invited artists Tatiana Akhmetgalieva, Marina Belova and Alexei Politov, Taisia Korotkova, the Mishmash Group, Haim Sokol, Larisa Zvezdochetova and others.

UK chamber pop ensemble The Irrepressibles make a bold move to perform a free concert in Gorky Park in Moscow on 21 May. The 10-piece ‘performance orchestra’, along with its openly gay visionary leader and composer Jaime McDermott, continue to confront controversial human rights issues that plague Russia and many other countries around the world...one performance at a time. This bold move will bring light to Russia’s evolving political stage, especially dealing with the country’s attitude towards homosexuality.

Using conceptual sets, and teams of artists in film, dance, avant-garde costume and make-up, the collective creates live spectacles around their songs.

The Irrepressibles are:

- Jamie McDermott - Composer / Voice / Guitar
- Sarah Kershaw - Piano
- Jordan Hunt - Violin
- Charlie Stock - Viola
- Nicole Robson - Cello
- Sophie Li - Double Bass
- Rosie Reed - Flute
- Craig White - Oboe / Cor Anglais
- Anna Westlake - Clarinet / Saxophone
- William Turner-Duffin - Sound Design / Electronics