SNKH's pop-up cinema at moscow's garage museum resembles an inverted bedouin tent

moscow’s celebrated pop-up cinema in gorky park, ‘garage screen’, has opened for 2020. the temporary project is located outside the garage museum of contemporary art, the institution designed by rem koolhaas and OMA, which opened in 2015. designed by armenian studio SNKH, the project was selected ahead of 135 other submissions from across europe and central asia. the pop-up cinema is currently screening movies with social distancing measures in place.

all images courtesy of the garage museum of contemporary art

conceived by SNKH as an inverted bedouin tent, the temporary scheme appears as a white tensile structure, while the interior has red walls that surround the large screen. noting that the new pavilion ‘is not instantly recognizable as a cinema,’ garage screen curator evgeny gusyatinskiy hopes that the current circumstances can make way for a ‘reinvention of the design and the very existence mode‘ of the movie-going experience.

following a series of open-air screenings on the museum’s rooftop in 2016, ‘garage screen’ first debuted as a standalone venue in 2019 with a translucent, flat-topped pyramid that housed seasonal programs through 2019. garage screen’s 2020 program ranges from international features like ‘ryuichi sakamoto: coda’ to lesser-known russian films like ‘babai’, an experimental take on slavic folklore, and ‘mother and son’, an early work by aleksandr sokurov. a full calendar can be viewed here.