The Moscow Art Museum for Contemporary Art, the Garage, once founded by the oligarch Roman Abramowitsch and his then partner Darja Schukowa as a platform to present international trends, has increasingly grown into the role of a funding institution for the Russian scene.

This is currently proven by the show “Keeping Your Distance.

Speculations, fakes and prognoses “with new works by Russian artists who deal with their loneliness as a result of the corona pandemic, but also because of the crackdown on civil protests and Russia's political self-isolation.

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the features section.

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    The exhibition, which can be seen until August 1st, goes back to an open invitation to tender by the house from the previous Corona spring, to which artists from all over the country responded with designs that deal with current trauma through escape movements, attempts at healing or ironic mystification in many ways Handle media. The environment "Lichte Lieder" by the Petersburg artists Maria Morina and Jekaterina Sokolowskaja, which is equipped with brightly colored plastic seating objects, achieves a maximum of hide-and-seek and mimicry, which composer Marina Karpowa provides with a sweet soundtrack that can be heard in every corner of the museum.Flattering singing voices intone fragments of words from reports on the corona pandemic as well as Putin's sayings on the occasion of his constitutional amendment and the victory parade and weave them into an incomprehensible text ornament.

    The Petersburg group goes exactly the opposite way with the classically utilitarian title “What to do?”, Which shows code numbers of Russian laws in fairground showcases - from the inviolability of privacy to the prohibition of environmental destruction or road blockades - to police troops pushing away passers-by or contaminated with photo documents To show Siberian rivers how state power violates them. At the center of the installation “For a Necessary Future” is a video from a utopian laboratory, where the artists, all dressed in blue-collar workers as a sign of their solidarity, practice rituals of interactive support in the format of a zoom conference or as an innovative form of Pavlovian conditioning practicing knee-jerk nausea in response to observing violence.

    In response to the world war cult and the adoration of the partisan Soja Kosmodemjanskaja (1923 to 1941) who was executed by the Germans, the artist Tatjana Efrussi founded a countercult of the peasant warrior Aljona von Arsamas (died 1670) and for this partisan against the patriarchate a museum model in the form of a Dollhouse built. In the figure of the Cossack Aljona, who was married to an old man at an early age, widowed, then went to the monastery, where she read, write and learned healing arts, motifs of early women's emancipation and the anti-colonial liberation struggle intersect.

    During the peasant uprisings under Stepan Razin, the "Russian Joan of Arc" took off her robe, gathered a peasant army and led it victoriously against the Tsar's general before she was defeated, captured and executed in Temnikow in what is now Mordovia. The artist group “Chotschesch” (“Willst Du”) invented a fictional heroine in architectural history in Tuapse, southern Russia, where multi-storey living spaces have been built over car garages since the 1990s. “Chotschesch” explains this poverty architecture in a film mystification about the project of an architect who belatedly implemented the futuristic vision of the “floating city” in the province.

    When it comes to processing the destruction of the environment, art has the slightest leeway. The Siberian artist Marina Ustomina brings to mind the forest fires that recur every summer in the region around Lake Baikal under the title “Udushje” (“Suffocating”) in photo series in which she witnesses the conflagrations, the times as a researcher and then as a shaman shortness of breath caused by them is documented. The self-portraits of the artist Andrej Schental in the midst of the nature of his hometown in the Moscow area, which was destroyed for the “Moscow – Beijing” motorway, appear all the more touching. Schental's naked body, nestling against felled tree trunks and kneeling down in the earth churned up by excavators, conjures up chthonic primal forces and pardons the battered planet.

    Keeping a distance - speculations, fakes and forecasts

    . In the garage, Moscow; until August 1st. The Russian and English language booklet is free of charge.