18th February, 11.00-12.30 

Live online via https://www.youtube.com/c/GARAGEMCA

 

Counterpoints Arts is collaborating with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow to present Communities In And Around Museums: Interaction, Practices and Principles.

The workshop will take place at Garage MCA and live online via YouTube as part of the Experiencing the Museum Conference

The discussion brings together Russian and British culture professionals who implement projects, in one way or another, designed for different communities, such as elderly people, people with migration experience, or deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors. The conversation will seek to define the  term “community” (using versions proposed by participants) and  discuss collectively the principles of interaction, who and how constructs them, whether the relationships between institutions and communities are mutually beneficial, and how they influence and change each other.

 

PARTICIPANTS

Marianna Kruchinski is public programs curator at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art, Krasnodar.  She is responsible for the Centre’s film program and for the design of inclusive projects in cooperation with the Generation, Open Environment, and Good South foundations.  Marianna will talk about her experience of launching a dance laboratory as part of the Garage Screen Film Festival and other practices of interacting with the city’s various communities.

Dr. Tehmina Goskar is Curator and Director of the Curatorial Research Centre, Art Fund Headley Fellow at the Museum of Cornish Life, and a Fellow of the Museums Association.  Tehmina will present the project Citizen Curators (2017–2021), a work-based curatorial training scheme aimed at the communities of seven museums in Cornwall, a rural and coastal region with huge wealth disparities, remote from large urban centres, and with very limited access to high-quality informal educational opportunities.  From the start, the program was pitched as an experiment in cultural democracy.  Unlike larger, more wealthy museums and universities, Citizen Curators was formed from the grassroots for the grassroots, with a very modest budget provided by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund.  It resulted in 80 people being successfully trained in curatorial skills, modern ethical practice, and critical museum awareness.  Tehmina’s presentation will reveal some of the key findings of the active four-year research project to show how successful such participatory and democratic learning programs are, their limitations, and the realisation of a more diverse and inclusive museum community and workforce.

Vlad Kolesnikov is a speech pathologist, Russian Sign Language interpreter, teacher of supplementary education at School #52 for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children, curator of Accessibility and Inclusion at GES-2 House of Culture, and co-curator of the Deaf Teens program at the project school Kaskad. Project as A Method.  From 2015 to 2018, he developed programs for deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and from 2018 to 2021, he was head of accessibility and the implementation of inclusive programs at the State Historical Museum.  His professional interests embrace education of deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences and their involvement in the overall cultural context.  Vlad will talk about the studio Kruzhok Kvadrat, an adapted extra-curricular education program for deaf and hard-of-hearing children that has been operating at Special School No. 52 since 2019.  Kruzhok Kvadrat introduces students to jobs in arts and culture to help them with future career choices.  The program uses special methods and techniques, including various forms of work that respond to each student’s individual needs in terms of development and education.

Rana Ibrahim is an Iraqi archeologist, a freelance collage artist, and the founder and director of the project Iraqi Women Art and War (IWAW).  Rana will present IWAW, a women’s community group based in Oxford and established in 2018.  The project gives women who have been affected by conflict an opportunity to process their experiences and tell their stories through art.

 

MODERATORS

Asel Rashidova is a manager in the Inclusive Programs Department at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Tom Green is a Senior Producer at Counterpoints Arts, an organisation that works in the UK and internationally on the arts, migration, and social change.

 

Attending the conference is available with advance registration.

More information: https://garagemca.org/en/event/conference-experiencing-the-museum-after-inclusion-utopias-and-new-scenarios

 

Image (c) Garage MCA