Moscow’s Garage launches Russia’s most extensive programme for disabled visitors

Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has unveiled Russia’s most extensive museum programme for disabled visitors.

This year’s programme will focus on increasing access for the museum’s deaf audience.

Garage’s new exhibition, Co-thinkers, is the first project in a series of yearly curatorial initiatives to foster equal access to the museum. During the development period, curators from Garage worked together with four collaborators with varying disabilities to choose eighteen suitable works by contemporary artists. Among those selected are pieces by Maurizio Cattelan, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Turrell, which were chosen for their propensity to alter or cast into question the audience’s perception.

The unique exhibition is intended as a sensory experience to be enjoyed by all audiences, to which end there will be 3D models of each artwork on display for museum-goers to touch.

This development is recognised as a crucial step in combatting institutionalised discrimination in Russia.

“We have this legacy of the Soviet period, when people with disabilities were largely segregated,” commented Maria Sarycheva, the coordinator of Garage’s department for inclusive programming.

Co-thinkers will open on 7 July and be on show until 9 September 2016. More information can be found here.

Source: Art Forum