On October 5 the Russian Art Archive Network conference will take place at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg. Participants include representatives of the institutions taking part in the RAAN project as well as independent researchers and staff of museums and contemporary art centers from Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Nizhny Tagil, Perm, St. Petersburg, Sochi, and other Russian cities. Participants will share their thoughts on the project and discuss archives that reflect local histories of art in various Russian cities. They will also explore questions relating to art historical research in Russia’s regions, the specificity of working with local artistic communities, and new ideas and methods for working with big data in archiving and museums.
The co-organizer of the conference is the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, which includes an art gallery that has been gathering a contemporary art archive related to Yekaterinburg. It comprises documentation of art events from the early 1990s to the present. Digitized materials will be accessible online on the RAAN platform and many of the originals will be available in the archive of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center. From September 28 to November 7, the Center will show the exhibition Let’s Make a Boat and the Water Will Come. It will feature part of the archive about the artists’ collective Atomic Province. The partnership between the Russian Art Archive Network and the Yeltsin Center is an important stage in making visible various institutional archives of contemporary art.
Initiated by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the RAAN project is an online catalogue of documents on Russian contemporary art that expands through the addition of materials from the collections of Garage and its Russian and international partners. Partners include the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center (Yekaterinburg); TsK19 Cultural Center (Novosibirsk); PERMM Museum of Contemporary (Perm); Togliatti Art Museum; Typography Center for Contemporary Art (Krasnodar); Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Germany); Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University (New Brunwick, USA).