Video archiving as an artistic practice. Public talk: Andrei Monastyrsky and Sasha Obukhova

DESCRIPTION

Poet, writer, painter, and art theorist Andrei Monastyrsky and Sasha Obukhova, curator of Garage Archive Collection, discuss video archiving as an artistic practice.

Garage Archive Collection includes unique documentation related to the Moscow Conceptualist circle, including video footage of exhibitions by Moscow artists in Russia, Germany, France, and the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The videos include exhibitions, performances, and private views, as well as small dinners, private readings, and country walks.

From this unique collection, Andrei Monastyrsky chose two videos, shot in 1970 and 1971, which demonstrate his early experiments in the field of visual poetry. Working with this material prompted Monastyrsky to reflect on his personal history and creative development, a process which formed the basis of his project for the exhibition Toward the Source. The talk will examine the value of video archives as a corroboration of time and as bearers of human experience.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Andrei Monastyrsky (b. 1949, Petsamo, Russia. Lives and works in Moscow) — artist, performer, poet, contemporary art theorist, and leader of the Moscow Conceptual School, Monastyrsky graduated from the language and literature faculty of the Moscow State University in 1980 and worked as an editor in the State Literature Museum in Moscow. In 1973, Monastyrsky began to work with serial structures and minimalistic sound compositions, and from 1975 created poetic objects and actions. As the co-founder of the Collective Actions group in 1976 (in collaboration with Nikita Alekseev, Nikolai Panitkov and George Kiesewalter), he was the author of the majority of actions, as well as the co-author of the Collective Actions documentation book, Journeys to the Countryside (currently eleven volumes).

Monastyrsky also participated in the art collectives Kapiton and Corbusier (both in collaboration with Vadim Zakharov and Yuri Leiderman) as well as in numerous exhibitions in Russia and abroad. These included the Dissident Biennale as part of the Venice Biennale (1977); the Venice Biennale (2003, 2007, 2011) and Documenta 12 in Kassell (2007). As author of numerous theoretical articles on contemporary art in national and foreign publications, he won the Andrei Bely prize (2003) for achievements in the development of Russian literature and the Innovation prize (2009) in the art theory and criticism category.

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.