The Garage Museum’s new Open Storage initiative is staging a unique exhibition about the shortlived yet legendary Gallery in Trekhprudny Lane and Russian art critic Mikhail Sidlin, once again sized up by one of the squat’s artists in a reconstructed performance, recalls two extraordinary years in the early nineties as the Soviet Empire fell and epoches broke.

In Moscow, an archival exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has presented the history of the city’s famous artist-run space ‘Gallery in Trekhprudny Lane’ for the first time ever using reconstructions of its individual exhibitions and recreating its timeline. According to their researchers, there were ninety-five exhibitions held at the gallery in Trekhprudny over two seasons from 1991 to 1993, of which eighty-seven were the famous ‘Gallery Thursdays’.

Over the seventeen years of its existence, the main achievement of the Garage has turned out to be its archive. Since 2022 high-profile exhibitions of Western and Eastern stars like Marina Abramović, (b. 1946) and Yayoi Kusama, (b. 1926) have receded, and now the museum is developing a new genre of ‘non/exhibition’. It was in 2012 that the first acquisitions entered the Garage archive, and today it contains more than seventy individual collections, comprising several thousand documents across various media.

In 2024 the Garage lauched their ‘Open Storage’ initiative as a way of displaying and presenting the collections in its archive. With a conspicuous absence of PR, the usual opening receptions, and distinctive visual presentation, it is hard to assess this new initiative even looking on the museum's website. Essentially, they are conventional exhibitions with ticketed entry, for which artists create new works and recreate their old ones.

On 30th January 1992, Alexander Sigutin (b. 1959) measured visitors to the Gallery in Trekhprudny. He weighed critics on scales, determined the height of artists, and recorded the age of viewers. This quasi-sociological experiment represented one of the first attempts to create an objectified portrait of a participant in the Moscow art scene. At the same time, simple metaphors such as “the weight of the critic” and “the stature of the artist” parodied the pseudo-scientific stratagems of Moscow romantic conceptualism of the 1980s. Research as an artistic device was a novelty for the Moscow art public in 1992.

Thirty-three years later, on 21st and 22nd July 2025, Sigutin conducted his study ‘Hierarchy in Art’ once again. At the Garage, he weighed curators and art critics, measured the height of artists, and surveyed viewers about their age. Not only the time and place but the context and the entire system of artistic production had completely changed. What was done the first time around as free artistic self-expression, on the border between parody and performance, is now institutionalised, described, and placed in a museum. And the mechanical scales with moveable weights and a medical height measure – ordinary objects from a clinic that the artist used in 1992 – have themselves become museum exhibits of Soviet daily life over the course of 33 years. The author of this text, when measured once again at the Garage, felt unexpected nostalgia, because bodily sensations are an intimate experience. But nonetheless, today this performance has completely lost its original parodic connection to Moscow conceptualism and now reads as irony towards numerous fashionable artistic quasi-studies.

As a witness to the life of the Gallery in Trekhprudny, I understand well the complexity of describing it. This project flourished at the break of epochs, when the nonconformist tradition of “apartment exhibitions“ had already died, and the new practice of the first commercial galleries quickly pushed “non-commercial”artists to the sidelines of the art process. Therefore, Trekhprudny became a point of resistance, a “non-profit gallery,” as it was called then, or an artist-run space, as they prefer to call it today – one of those places where a new ethics of participation and group solidarity was born. One could call this territory both a residency (with free accommodation and no obligations) and a collaboration and self-organisation, because it became that point of growth from which many completely different branches later emerged.

The Gallery in Trekhprudny Lane existed for two exhibition seasons, from early September 1991 to the end of May 1993 – that is, it appeared after the August Putsch of 1991 and ended its existence before the armed conflict between the President and the Parliament (Verkhovny Sovet) in October 1993, during the most acute period of USSR and Russia's recent history. Its flourishing was directly connected to the collapse of the USSR, which released, as in a nuclear explosion, enormous kinetic energy that set in motion previously immobile social strata and cultural masses, mixed together in the new Moscow, this melting pot. In one of the quiet lanes near Tverskaya Street, a group of artists from different cities and republics of the USSR – which was visibly transforming into a fallen empire – took over a vacated house. Their settlement cannot be unambiguously called a squat, because they lived there by agreement with the new owners of the building. And on the top floor of the house, more in an attic than a loft (although this space was considered a residential flat), the ‘Gallery in Trekhprudny Lane’ appeared.

In the late 1980s, the term ‘South Russian school’ came into fashion. This rather odd definition brought together artists who lived across a space extending a thousand kilometres from Chișinău (now Moldova) to Rostov-on-Don, and who actually belonged to completely different worlds. For such a definition to appear, it was necessary for all of them to move to Moscow, where – and only there – could they were able to become a united team. “Unlike Odessa, which constantly spits out from its depths ever new people, Rostov-on-Don has always been a clearly rotten place,” wrote artist Ilya Kitup (b. 1964) in 1992 (under the pseudonym Ilyas Mitupov), a poet, artist, musician, native of Vilnius, chronicler of Trekhprudny, resident of this squat, and author of most of the texts for gallery exhibitions. “Rostov-papa is much coarser and more unforgiving than Odessa-mama in mental terms.” The nerve of Trekhprudny became the alliance of conditional ‘Odessa’ and conditional ‘Rostov’, whilst ‘Odessa’ could be represented by natives of the city of Mykolaiv (Ukraine) Viktor Kas’yanov (b. 1966) and Alexander Kharchenko (b. 1999), ‘Rostov’ by a native of the city of Sal’sk (Russia) Valery Koshlyakov (b. 1962), and alongside them worked both the Moscow-born artist Vladimir Dubossarsky (b. 1964) and Pavel Aksenov (b. 1960) (a newcomer from Izhevsk), and altogether about fifty artists, of whom some lived in the squat permanently, some came for periods, but most were those who simply participated in projects.

Vinny Reunov (b. 1963), a Kyiv native, and Avdey Ter-Oganyan (b. 1961), from Rostov, organised the first exhibition at Trekhprudny called ‘Mercy’ which immediately gained notorious scandalous fame. At the first gallery opening, three vagrants invited from the street sat beneath photocopies of Rembrandt etchings. This action immediately defined the gallery’s character as socially critical and parodically conceptual, performative and participatory. Reality – beggars – was juxtaposed with its artistic reflection – works by Rembrandt (from the exhibition leaflet cover, Rembrandt himself looked out at viewers depicted as a beggar, his famous self-portrait). The reference to Joseph Kosuth’s (b. 1945) ‘Chair’ was easily read by the few visitors, but the intention of the action itself was closer to Theodor Adorno: how can art exist after social disaster – the collapse of the USSR, which made millions of people poor and thousands homeless? Can art overcome tragedy? Can it feed the hungry?

After the first exhibition, others followed as rapidly as machine-gun fire. Every week there was one exhibition, a pace that no one has even attempted to repeat in Moscow since. And after two years, the gallery entered a burn-out phase. Not because the artists had exhausted all possible themes for their meetings, but because the epoch had changed.

The real world quickly offered its answer. And when in October 1993 Reunov and Ter-Oganyan attempted to repeat their project in Moscow's Kunsthalle, the Central House of Artists, as part of a group exhibition, the security would not let the “stinking tramps” into the temple of the ‘white cube’. Their place was taken by photographs of the action at Trekhprudny.

In Moscow's artistic mythology of recent times, Trekhprudny occupies a special place. The legendary squat of the 1990s has faded in the memory of new generations whilst simultaneously being surrounded by a tangle of confused stories in which, as in any true history, love and death, fame and oblivion are intertwined.

The death that placed a bold symbolic full stop in the gallery's fate was the murder of Sergey Timofeev (1959–1993) in June 1993. The Rostov artist and rock musician was shot six months after his exhibition at Trekhprudny. In broad daylight in central Moscow, they say he was killed for refusing to give up his place in the queue at a beer/cigarette kiosk.