Moscow art magazine provides free online access to all issues

In spring 2020, Moscow Art Magazine—Russia’s key journal on contemporary art theory—completed the digitization of its past issues. All materials published since 1993 are now available on the Moscow Art Magazine website. The English version of the site features digests of selected articles published in English from 1993 to 2014. 

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has supported Moscow Art Magazine since 2015. With the help of Garage, the journal relaunched its website in 2016, and in 2017, to mark 25 years of Moscow Art Magazine, the Museum published a collection of selected articles in the English-language book Critical Mass. In 2019, Garage hosted a series of meetings with journal authors and contributors, including David Joselit, Patricia Reed, and Giuliana Bruno, co-organized by the Museum and Moscow Art Magazine.

Viktor Misiano, editor-in-chief of Moscow Art Magazine, commented: “Moscow Art Magazine has published 112 issues since 1993 and they are all now available on the website. The journal has shared a long journey with Russian contemporary art and with the broader, global art scene. The complete online archive of Moscow Art Magazine will be an important source for those who study the art of the past three decades and anyone interested in current questions as discussed by art theorists, historians, and practitioners. I hope that going through the entire body of texts will be an interesting and intellectually rewarding task, but it will not be easy. It will, and perhaps should, take a long time, as the reader keeps returning to issues that are of specific interest at any particular moment. However, issue 112 will be followed by new ones. As Georgy Litichevsky writes in his comic strips published on the first page of every issue, ‘To be continued…’”

Moscow Art Magazine is a journal on contemporary art for the professional community. A major platform for art criticism in post-perestroika Russia, it has published artist manifestos and essays by some of the key figures of the 1990s art scene, including Alexander Brener, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Alyona Martynova, and Giya Rigvava, as well as the first Russian translations of important contemporary art theorists and philosophers, such as Rosalind Krauss, Germano Celant, and Nicolas Bourriaud. Ludmila Bredikhina, Irina Kulik, Ekaterina Degot, Andrey Kovalev, and Evgenia Kikodze were among the main contributors to the debate on key issues of contemporary art that unfolded on its pages. Throughout its history, Moscow Art Magazine has remained the only Russian periodical entirely devoted to the theory and philosophy of contemporary art.

In fall 2016, Moscow Art Magazine transferred its archive to Garage Archive Collection, the world’s largest archive on Russian contemporary art. Along with past issues of journal, the archive contains a sizeable body of documents on the curatorial projects of its editor-in-chief, Viktor Misiano—including at the Contemporary Art Center on Yakimanka Street in Moscow and the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Misiano was the Pavilion’s commissioner and curator in 1995 and 2003)—and on the conference A Big Project for Russia (2003), which anticipated the launch of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.