Artists rethought the archive of the "garage"

From February 1 to April 23, the Museum of Contemporary Art “Garage” in Moscow will host an exhibition “In the direction of the source”, which will present the results of the study of the archive collection of the museum conducted by artists of different generations.

This exhibition, the organizers report , will be the first project for the Garage, "in which artists are invited to conduct a study in the archive collection of the museum and, according to the results of the discoveries made, create a new job or offer a new interpretation of archive documents."

Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, Vladimir Logutov, Andrey Monastyrsky, Kirill Savchenkov, Olga Chernysheva participate in the project. They studied the collection for eight months and “on the basis of their research ... came to a new understanding of the archive, documents that were in the center of their attention, and historical circumstances that gave rise to these documents.”

“Project participants are placing a collective art history in a new perspective, finding the reference points for a new understanding of history or a preferential dialogue with the past in traces of their predecessors.”

The archival collection of Garage is the largest public archive in Russia dedicated to Russian art from the 1950s to the present day. Now it contains more than 400 thousand storage units transferred by galleries, artists, collectors and curators.

These are photographs, portraits of artists and reproductions of their work, video documentation of exhibitions and performances, a corps of texts written by artists, as well as published and unpublished articles of critics, artists, press releases, catalogs and other exhibition materials.