Zakharov established the archive to capture and preserve a specific moment in time, and to document the development of the artistic circle he belonged to. By assuming the role of chronicler of the Moscow conceptualists, he was playing just one of many parts that he used in his contextual studies. For a long time, Zakharov’s art was the sum of his characters’ functions: he was "the publisher," "the collector," and "the artist," as much as "the archivist." As Boris Groys points out, “Vadim Zakharov takes on all the jobs offered by the art system—artist, curator, critic, designer, publisher, biographer, archivist, documentary filmmaker, historian, and interpreter”—to affirm his cultural autonomy.
Artist as an Institution. Lecture by Vadim Zakharov
Date
Schedule
19:30–21:00
Place
Garage Education Center
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Vadim Zakharov was born in Dushanbe, now Tajikistan, in 1959. He graduated from the Moscow State V. I. Lenin Pedagogical Institute in 1982 and regularly exhibited at APTART Gallery from 1982 to 1984. In the early 1980s, he took part in compiling the MANI (Moscow Archive of New Art) folders and MANI’s To the Studios 1 publication, as well as staring his own collection and archive of contemporary art in Moscow. In 1989, Zakharov moved to Germany and founded Pastor Zond Editions, which would publish the small-circulation Pastor journal on Moscow conceptualism from 1992 to 2001. He was the compiling editor of Moscow Conceptualism (2005) and participated in the Kapiton and Corbusier art groups from 2008 to 2010. Zakharov is a recipient of the Innovation contemporary art prize (2006) and the Kandinsky Prize (2009), and he represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013. He is currently based between Berlin, Cologne, and Moscow.
