Public talk with curators Kaspars Vanags and Sasha Obukhova

Kaspars Vanags is a curator and art theorist with a master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He was a founding member of Riga’s Open creative collective (1994), which organized interdisciplinary festivals that were a platform for active interaction and synergy between visual art, electronic music, new media, and literature. His latest projects include Slash: in between the normativa and the fantasy at Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga (2015) and You’ve Got 1234 Unread Messages at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga (2018). Vanags also curated the Latvian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). He lives and works in Riga.

Sasha Obukhova is the curator of Garage Archive Collection. She graduated in Art History and Theory from the History Faculty of Moscow State University (1992) and studied Art History at the Central European University, Prague, in 1993. From 1993 to 1996 she worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow, and from 1999 to 2003 she was Senior Researcher at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. In 2004, she became a founding member and director of the Art Projects Foundation, where she established the Archive of Contemporary Russian Art. In 2011–2012, she was Head of Education at the National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow. Since 2012, Obukhova has been Head of Research and then Garage Archive Collection curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. The author of numerous research papers on Russian contemporary art, she lives and works in Moscow.