To mark the 10th anniversary of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art the Archive Collection team will reveal the history of the Museum’s archive and particular collections within it.
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. Archive workers will reveal their personal perspective of the Museum’s collection, talk about the specifics of storing and cataloguing materials, and share curious facts on collectors of archive materials and documents, many relating to famous artists. The tour will provide an insight into profession of a contemporary archive worker.
The core of the Garage Research Department collection comprises an archive that previously belonged to Khudozhestvennyie Proekti (Art Projects) Foundation. The collection was bequeathed to Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in September 2012. Further donations to the archive have been made by Elena Selina (XL Gallery), Aidan Salakhova (Aidan Gallery), Irina Meglinskaya (Schkola 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 to 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 Backstein, the artists archives of Viktor Pivovarov, Francisco Infante-Arana, the photo archives of Vlad Chizenkov, George Kiesewalter, Igor Palmin, the archive of Moscow Art Magazine 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.