Sasha Obukhova, curator of Garage Archive Collection will talk about the history of the Museum’s archive and the difference between a contemporary art archive and archives of other types.
Free guided tours will be organized at Garage Archive Collection, to show visitors why museums need to archive the contemporary and what makes such archives different from others. Sasha Obukhova, curator of Garage Archive Collection, will talk about the unusual artefacts that may end up in the archive worker’s hands, what registrars and art historians do with them, and how fruitful is further research.
The core of Garage Research Department collection is comprised of an archive that previously belonged to Khudozhestvennyie Proekti (Artistic Projects) Foundation. The collection was bequeathed to Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in September 2012. Further donations to the archive were made by Elena Selina (XL Gallery), Aidan Salakhova (Aidan Gallery), Irina Meglinskaya (Shkola Gallery), Elena Bakanova (Paperworks Gallery), and Nina Zaretskaya (TV Gallery). Also, since 2012, the Museum’s collection has stored an archive of Russian press publications dating from 1907–1927, that includes numerous mentions of futurist poets and artists of the time.
In 2014, the archive acquired a documental collection particularly important to the history of post-war Russian art—the collection of Leonid Talochkin, a famous archivist of ‘the second Russian avant-garde’.
Between 2015 and 2018, further acquisitions were made, such as the video collections of Vadim Zakharov, Mikhail Nazarov, and Joseph Bakstein, the artists archives of Viktor Pivovarov, Francisco Infante-Arana, the photo archives of Vlad Chizhenkov, Georgy Kiesewalter, Igor Palmin, the archive of ‘Moscow Art Magazine Archive’ and many others.
In 2017 Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN) project launched a website, that gives access to electronic-catalogue of Garage Archive with an option to search.
