This year Garage’s grant program for researchers focuses on the history of contemporary art institutions in Russia. The program is open to researchers from across the world.
The main goal of Archive Summer is to promote Garage Archive Collection as a source of information for researchers writing on Russian contemporary art. The focus of the program changes every year to reflect the variety of topics covered by the archive’s documents and the researchers’ academic interests.
Institutional development is among the aspects of Russian contemporary art history that have yet to be thoroughly studied. In 2013 and 2014 Garage collaborated with Ekaterina Foundation and XL Projects to produce Reconstruction, a two-volume companion to the exhibition of the same name devoted to the history of Moscow art galleries in the 1990s and based on the findings of Garage Research. Since the publication of Reconstruction, Garage Archive has dramatically expanded its collection of documents on the history of Russian art institutions, which now includes materials on the Tsaritsyno Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery’s collections of contemporary art (Andrey Erofeev Colection), The Club of Avant-Garde Artists, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow, The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow Art Magazine, Fabrika Center for Creative Industries, Moskovskaya Palitra Gallery, and Gallery 21 (Saint Petersburg).
The archive also holds a unique collection of documents, videos, and photographs from the archives of the first galleries that emerged in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Aidan Gallery, XL Gallery, TV Gallery), archives of the key Russian critics and pioneering curators, including those who worked with particular institutions (Andrey Erofeev, Viktor Misiano, Victor and Margarita Tupitsyn), photo and video archives of Igor Makarevich, George Kiesewalter, Joseph Backstein, Vlad Chizhenkov, Mikhail Nazarov and others, as well as documents on self-organised initiatives and artist-run exhibition spaces in different cities.
Five winners will be selected through an open call. Applications will be accepted from February 28 until March 31. The program will take place from June 3 to September 1.
Application deadline: March 31, 2019
Grant award amount: 70,000 rubles