Garage invites international researchers who write about Russian art to take part in the grant program Archive Summer. In 2020, the program focuses on the temporal, aesthetic, and social boundaries of Russian contemporary art.
Initiated by Garage Research in 2018, Archive Summer was launched to promote Garage Archive Collection as a source of information for researchers who write about the Soviet underground and Russian contemporary art. Six participants chosen through an open call will be awarded grants to cover their travel and accommodation in Moscow and get access to Garage Archive for one month.
The research interests of the applicant should be related to this year’s research topic: the temporal, aesthetic and social boundaries of Russian contemporary art. Applicants are invited to analyze the criteria behind the selection of artists, events, and institutions to be represented in the archive.
Resources available to participants
Garage Archive Collection includes artist portfolios, photographs and videos relating to both key and little-known events in the recent history of Russian art, artist diaries and correspondence, as well as other materials that enable the formation of a clear picture of the art scene before and after perestroika.
Garage Collection also contains several personal archives gathered by people active on the art scene in different years. The largest among them is the archive of Leonid Talochkin, a collector and archivist who documented the history of the Russian art scene for many decades, including in his diaries and correspondence with Russian artists in emigration, as well as in a collection of materials such as handwritten exhibition invitations. Rare books and small-edition catalogues of Russian artists’ exhibitions in various countries carefully preserved by Talochkin are now available at Garage Library, which the researchers are also welcome to use.
Another important archive in Garage Collection was gathered by Francisco Infante-Arana, one of the leaders of Soviet kinetic art and co-founder of Dvizhenie (1960s–1970s) group—the pioneers of kinetic art in Russia. Infante’s archive contains sketches by Dvizhenie artists, exhibition and installation plans, manuscripts with theoretical writings, and manifestoes by Russian kinetic artists.
An important part of Garage Archive Collection is formed by photographic archives documenting the Soviet art scene transferred by Igor Makarevich and George Kiesewalter. In addition to that, Garage now holds the archives of Joseph Backstein, Viktor Misiano, Andrey Erofeev, Natalya Kamenetskaya, Viktor Agamov-Tupitsyn and Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna. Book collections from their personal libraries are available at Garage Library.
Sources on the art of the 1990s and 2000s are contained in the collections focused on the history of Russian Actionism and art activism, collections transferred by Russia’s first independent art galleries (XL Gallery, L Gallery, TV Gallery, Obscuri Viri, and Shkola among others) and personal archives of the group Factory of Found Clothes and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe among others. Documents on the art scenes outside of Moscow are available in the archive of the project Open Systems. Self-Organized Art Initiatives in Russia: 2000–2015.
In 2017, Garage launched the Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN)—an open online catalogue offering access to digitized documents from the collection of Garage and partnering institutions, which contain some of the most valuable documents on the history of Soviet and Russian art. Partners include the Research Centre for East European Studies (University of Bremen, Germany) and Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers University, USA).
The program will run from June 1 to September 1, 2020.
Application deadline: March 17, 2020
Grant award amount: 70,000 rubles