ART-PRESENTATION:Tomorrow Is The Question

The first large-scale exhibition of the Argentinian artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in Russia is held at the new building of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Tiravanija has created a series of interconnected participatory projects that form a dialog with the history of the Soviet Modernist building Garage inhabits, as well as with popular activities that the artist experienced and envisaged in the city.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Adding another perspective to the exhibition, the artist has also paid homage to little-known Czechoslovakian conceptualist Július Koller, (1939-2007). Occupying the Central Gallery and Skylight Gallery of the Museum, the exhibition both recalls and updates the original functions of the building as a social hub of the city, as well as highlighting the unique approach architect Rem Koolhaas took in envisaging a permanent home for Garage. Covering the floor in a deep plush, purple carpet, Tiravanija will transform the space into a surreal place for leisurely passing time, filling it with custom-black ping pong tables that are flanked by two “stations” reminiscent of Soviet-style bus stop architecture. These will house the equipment for serving guests pelmeni (the quotidian Russian dumpling) throughout the run of the exhibition, as well as a t-shirt factory. In a conceptual game of “ping pong” with Czechoslovakian artist Július Koller, whose work is presented in Moscow for the first time, Tiravanija has selected pieces from the Július Koller Archive that both extend and accentuate the paradoxical relationships between art and life that the two artists share. Central to the “exhibition in an exhibition” are the presentation of a number of works that refer to Koller’s interest in table tennis, as well as Ping-Pong Monument (U.F.O.) (1971) which is a collage showing a gigantic table tennis bat lifted heroically towards the sky in front of a housing estate. Transforming Koller’s dry humor and “anti-happening” manifesto, into his own call to action, Tiravanija has also restaged one of Koller’s seminal works Universal Futurological Question Mark (U.F.O.), from 1978, wherein the artist sat with children in a field to form a question mark, which was then photographed.

Info:Tomorrow Is The Question, Curating: Kate Fowle, Ekaterina Inozemtseva, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 9/32 Krymsky Val st., Moscow, Duration: 12/6-23/8/15, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu: 12:00-21:00, Fri-Sun: 12:00-22:00, http://garageccc.com/en