Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN) expands its field of activity in 2019

Beginning in July 2019, online catalogues of two new archive collections—owned by Igor Golomshtok and Boris Groys/ Natalia Nikitina and stored at the Research Center for East European Studies (University of Bremen, Germany)—will become available on the Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN) website.

Director of the Research Center, Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg, commented: “RAAN brings together in the digital space archives located in different parts of the world, thus providing an opportunity for researchers and anyone else interested in the subject to get acquainted with rare, oftentimes intimate records of eminent art theorists and practitioners from the Soviet Union. I am excited that the Internet helps us to overcome borders that shouldn’t exist.”

Art historian Igor Golomshtok’s private archive was donated to the Research Center for East European Studies (University of Bremen, Germany) in 1996, with the latest materials received in 2018. The collection includes Golomshtok’s biographical and creative materials: his diaries (1961–1974), manuscripts of articles and lectures he read at the Art History Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University in the mid-1960s and later at other universities, as well as manuscripts and layouts of his books.

Philosopher and cultural theorist Boris Groys has been an active contributor to artistic and critical processes since the 1970s. The private collection of Groys and his wife, photographer and journalist Natalia Nikitina, was received by the Research Center for East European Studies (University of Bremen, Germany) in 2009. The core part of the archive consists of documents related to the work and life of Groys and Nikitina, including manuscripts of books, articles, interviews, essays, materials documenting the philosopher’s professional practice, and other records. Additionally, the collection features Groys’s extensive correspondence devoted to the issues of contemporary art and philosophy, including correspondence on phenomenology with Tatyana Goricheva, dialogues with Ilya Kabakov, letters from Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Andrey Monastyrsky, Pavel Pepperstein, Yuri Senokosov, Ivan Chuikov, and others. The archive also covers their lives in West Germany before moving to the US.

The Russian Art Archive Network is planning to develop collaborations with new partners from Garage’s regional program: Perm Museum of Modern Art (PERMM), Tipografia Center for Contemporary Art (Krasnodar), and researchers Alexandra Scherbina and Viktoria Kalinina who collaborate with the Contemporary Art Department of Togliatti Art Museum. These institutions have instigated the creation of unique collections of archival materials about notable representatives of local art scenes.

The Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany, was founded in 1982. The forming of its archival collection focused primarily on samizdat and other materials documenting the life and practice of representatives of dissident movements and non-official art from the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the DDR. Today the Center is pursuing two goals: understanding the social and cultural heritage of these countries, and the study of present-day processes in the post-Soviet region.

The section “The Soviet Union and the Countries of Former USSR” stores samizdat journals, various documents related to the human rights movement, and over 600 personal archives, many by Soviet Nonconformist artists, writers, and poets, including the archives of Anna Alchuk, Anatoly Brusilovsky, Eduard Gorokhovsky, Igor Golomshtok, Mikhail Grobman, Boris Groys and Natalia Nikitina, Boris Zaborov, Lev Nusberg, Sergey Sigey and Ry Nikonova, Genrikh Sapgir, Igor Kholin, as well as the large collection of the German historian and expert in Slavic cultures Karl Eimermacher, which includes materials from Vadim Sidur. The Center’s Archive also contains materials from the Moscow Archive of New Art (MANI) and A-Ya art journal, and photographs documenting life in the artistic circles of Moscow, Leningrad, and Paris.

Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg says: “Compared to Berlin, Bremen is not such a large city, so people often feel surprised that such a comprehensive archive is located here, in the tiny area famous for the Bremen musicians. This is why we always hoped for a collaboration like this, with RAAN, so that our funds will become accessible to a wide audience in spite of their location.”