The Jewish Museum and the Tolerance Centre in Moscow are due to build a new pavilion for temporary exhibitions. The board of trustees, headed by the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, announced that the expansion was because of the museum’s “growing exhibition and educational programmes”. The new pavilion will be housed within the Bakhmetev bus garage, the former home of the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, which reopened in a Rem Koolhaas-designed building in Gorky Park in June. An open competition for Russian and international architects is due to be announced soon, says Alexander Boroda, the director of the Jewish Museum.
The museum will also start showing material from the USC Shoah Foundation, the non-profit organisation founded by Steven Spielberg to gather video testimonies from Holocaust survivors. The archive, which Spielberg began in 1994 after making Schindler’s List, includes 52,000 interviews with victims of the Holocaust and other genocides. “We are keen to use this material in the permanent collection of the museum, as well as for the educational programmes of the Tolerance Centre,” says Boroda.
Meanwhile, the museum presented the new concept for its Centre of Avant-garde Art, which will be overseen by Andrey Sarabyanov, an expert in the Russian avant-gardes. The centre plans to bring “forgotten” or lesser-known avant-garde works to the Jewish Museum in collaboration with both small regional museums and national museums, such as the State Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Sarabyanov says. The first exhibition is scheduled to open in spring 2016.