Learn why museums want to archive the contemporary and how contemporary art archives are different from any other collection on free tours of the Archive Collection at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
Free tours with members of Garage Research team, who are in charge of maintaining, systematizing, and describing the Museum’s Archive Collection, will introduce visitors to the contemporary art archive. Each guide will share their vision of the Archive Collection, talk about the collections it contains, explain how contemporary art archives function and why they exist—and show some of the unusual materials Museum archivists encounter in their daily work.
Founded in 2012, Garage Archive holds a unique collection of documents and artefacts, photographs and videos documenting Soviet and Russian contemporary art from the 1950s to the 2010s. Since the launch of the archive, the Museum has gathered over 500,000 items and about forty archives.
The Art Projects Foundation archive acquired in 2012 became the core of the collection that soon grew with the addition of archives donated by Elena Selina (XL Gallery), Aidan Salakhova (Aidan Gallery), Irina Meglinskaya (Shkola Gallery) and Nina Zaretskaya (TV Gallery).
In 2014, Garage acquired the archive of collector Leonid Talochkin, the chronicler of unofficial Soviet art of the postwar period, followed by the video archives of Vadim Zakharov, Mikhail Nazarov and Joseph Backstein, as well as the collections of artists Viktor Pivovarov and Francisco Infante-Arana and curators Andrey Erofeev, Viktor and Margarita Tupitsyn, and the archives of the Moscow Art Magazine and Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, gathered from 2015 to 2018.
Since 2016, Garage has been assembling an institutional archive documenting the Museum’s own activities. In 2017, the Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN) website was launchedthat provides access to Garage Archive Collection’s online catalogue open for all users to browse.