Garage Library announces a new series of book exhibitions, the first of which marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Garage Library has a rapidly expanding collection of materials on Russian art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including books and catalogues on the period around the Revolution. This exhibition examines how the interpretation and representation of the events of October 1917 changed over time, as reflected in exhibition practices in Russia and abroad. Visitors will find materials about the Revolution’s influence on the Russian avant-garde and also on the theory and history of Productivism. The publications displayed will be available to Library visitors for browsing.
Sasha Obukhova, Garage Archive Collection curator, explains: “This year, many museums have organized exhibitions to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and many of them raise new questions regarding social history. At Garage, we decided to study how the anniversary has been received over time in different countries, how curators approached the subject, and how the academic community reacted both to the Revolution and to the art of the period.”
The exhibition includes monographs and catalogues of Russian and international exhibitions, which present a wide variety of exhibition practices, demonstrating the ways in which the interpretation of the Revolution has changed (including as a result of the new aesthetic doctrines of the 1910s and 1920s) and how those interpretations have been studied by art historians and curators in the postwar period. Publishers include major institutions such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Royal Academy of Arts, London, Art Institute of Chicago; and Kunstmuseum Luzern.
This is a Garage Research Department project.