Conspiracy theories and deepfakes: 3 Russian contemporary art shows reimagine a post-Covid world
Mikhail Maksimov, Flatality , 2020. Courtesy the artist and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
25 March 2021
Text:
Lucía de la Torre
Three exhibitions exploring Moscow’s post-pandemic future are opening at the city’s Garage Museum of Art.
The shows, which are all launching as part of the museum’s spring programme, offer alternative perspectives on life in Moscow through reimagining the past, questioning the present, and creating scenarios for the future.
Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene is the Museum’s first exhibition to be curated through an open call. Released in July 2020, the competition asked for artists living in Russia to submit their projects that reflected on the changes that the virus could bring into our lives. Viewers are led through their imagined worlds like the playthrough of a computer game, revealing would-be societies taken over by alternative medicine, conspiracy theories, and biopolitical systems of control.
Also opening at the gallery is David Clearbout: Unseen Sound, the Belgian video artist’s first solo exhibition in Russia. His work on “dark optics”, a technique used to manipulate photographs, is showcased alongside the work of Canadian artist and musician Rodney Graham and Qatari-American writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria in a bid to to question the audience’s trust in images in the era of deepfakes. The third exhibition, Present Continuous, revives Garage’s architectural archives and presents alternate perspectives of Moscow through the hidden history of unrealised projects, from a dance hall in Gorky Park to a light and sound installation on Red Square.
All three exhibitions are opening on March 26. Find out more about Garage’s spring programme here.
