Garage Archive Collection and RAAN

Contacts

Application for Archive Collection access

Guidelines for requesting documents

+7 495 645 05 20
research@garagemca.org

Russian Art Archive Network

An international online platform, initiated by Garage, bringing together archives on Russian art from the postwar period to the present.

Visit RAAN

Garage Archive Collection aims to provide an academic platform for the study of Russian contemporary art in an international context.

Since the first archive was transferred to Garage in 2012, the collection has continued to expand thanks to new donations and acquisitions. Today, it includes documentation from Moscow galleries, the personal archives of artists and collectors, the Museum’s institutional archive, an archive of art press, and other materials.

The core of Garage Archive Collection is the Art Projects Foundation archive. In its first year, the collection was supplemented with donations from Elena Selina, Aidan Salakhova, Irina Meglinskaya, and Elena Bakanova, who transferred the archives of XL, Aidan, and Shkola galleries, materials on exhibitions at L Gallery in the early 1990s, and the electronic exhibitions archive of Paperworks Gallery. Every year new archives are added as part of the Museum’s acquisitions strategy.

In 2018, Garage began acquiring archives related to the history of underground and contemporary art in Leningrad and St. Petersburg. The Museum chose not to move those archives to Moscow but to leave them in the city where they were compiled.

The St. Petersburg archives in Garage Archive Collection include that of art historian and archivist of the local art scene Andrei Khlobystin; the archive on Sergey Kuryokhin compiled by Sergey Chubraev; and Irina Aktuganova and Sergei Busov’s archive covering several of the city’s key art institutions (including Cyber Femin Club, Techno Art Center, Experimental Sound Gallery, and the Museum of Sound).

You can visit Garage Archive Collection in St. Petersburg as part of a tour about the history of the collection and individual documents linked to the artistic life of Leningrad and St. Petersburg from the 1950s to the present. To book a place on a tour, please write to archivespb@garagemca.org. The maximum number of participants is 7.

The Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN) was launched in 2017. Initiated by Garage, it aims to promote Russian art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. RAAN is an online catalogue that provides access to materials on contemporary Russian art from Garage Archive Collection and the archives of partner institutions. The RAAN project involves the gradual digitization of the archives of partner institutions, which are then uploaded to an app developed by Garage, and the integration of information from their databases.

Garage Archive Commissions

Garage Archive Commissions is an artist engagement program based on the project Toward the Source. In 2016, several Russian artists were invited to conduct research in Garage Archive Collection, resulting in an exhibition of new work displayed at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. The Garage Archive Commission also involves the creation of new works based on immersion in Garage Archive materials, such as diaries, sketches, and correspondence.

The project aims to enable artists to analyze the life and practice of their predecessors and compare life and work today and in previous decades, as well as to identify new lines of inheritance and generational conflict in Russian art.

The results of this work will be presented in the Skylight Gallery at Garage.