Public talk: The letter as an artifact of modernity

DESCRIPTION

Can a private story captured on paper become a living voice of our time? How can an archive document give new artistic meanings to the past? Olga Chernysheva and Lev Snegirev, two artists featured in the exhibition Toward the Source, discuss the role of letters in documenting history.

Olga Chernysheva selected artist Lev Snegirev’s letters of the 1990s to collector Leonid Talochkin—which are now part of Garage Archive Collection—as the basis for her project for the exhibition Toward the Source, in which she examines letters as the voice of the past and as a zone of alienation and self-isolation for the artist.

What is the value of letters? Can they be a source of dialogue with the past and present us with a new understanding of history? The discussion will be led by Sasha Obukhova, curator of Garage Archive Collection.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Olga Chernysheva (b. 1962, Moscow. Lives and works in Moscow) graduated from the Moscow Cinema Academy (1986) and later studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (1995-1996). In recent exhibitions, Chernysheva has moved freely between media, simultaneously presenting drawings, paintings, photographs, audiovisual installations, and films.
Her solo exhibitions include In the Middle of Things, presented at BAK in Utrecht (2011), Compossibilities at Kunsthalle Erfurt (2013), Keeping Sight at Muhka in Antwerp (2014–2015), and most recently, Vague Accent at The Drawing Center in New York (2016).
She has participated in many international group exhibitions, such as the 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006), the 6th Berlin Biennale (2010), Ostalgia at the New Museum in New York (2011), and the 57th Venice Biennale (2015). She also represented Russia at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001.

Lev Snegirev (Born in 1931, Margilan, lives in Nelidovo Tver region) — a member of the Moscow Union of Artists, participant of numerous exhibitions in Russia, Uzbekistan and abroad. His works are in the State Museum of Arts named after Savitsky (Nukus), Directorate of Art Exhibitions Academy of Art (Tashkent), Ferghana Regional Museum, the Museum of history of the city of Margilan, Kokand Regional Studies Museum, Tver Regional Art Gallery, museums and private collections USA, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, South Korea.

Sasha Obukhova is curator of Garage Archive Collection. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1992 and in 1993 studied at the Central European University (Prague). She has worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery, and the National Center for Contemporary Art. In 2000 she was involved in a working group that curated a permanent exhibition for the Tretyakov Gallery: The Art of the Second Half of the XX Century. In 2004 she became a founding member and director of the Art Projects Fund where she established ACRA (the Archive of Contemporary Russian Art). She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Kandinsky Prize.