Moscow Art Magazine archive

The Archive

In autumn 2016, Garage Archive Collection received a donation from the cult publication Moscow Art Magazine. Unique materials donated to Garage include: catalogues of international solo and group exhibitions and international biennials, including the Paris Biennale, Mercosul Biennial (Brazil), and the Slovenian Triennial of Contemporary Art; rare periodicals including Contemporania, Les cahiers du muséenational d'art moderne (published by Centre Pompidou) and Cabinet; all issues of Moscow Art Magazine and other publications affiliated with it (including writings by Boris Groys, Michel Foucault, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, and Achille Bonito Oliva); Part of the journal’s archive has been transferred to Garage’s Media Archive: it contains video and audio documentation of exhibitions and events spanning the period from the 1980s to the 2000s. These include videos with Sergey Kuryokhin, Collective Actions, Radek, Elena Kovylina, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Vadim Fishkin, Dmitry Gutov and Evgeny Asse, audio interviews with Boris Groys, Leonid Talochkin, Andrei Kovalev, Ekaterina Degot, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Yuri Leiderman, Yuri Avvakumov, Lev Yevzovich and Leonid Sokov, as well as audio documentation of The Big Project for Russia symposium.

Garage Archive Collection received booklets and catalogues published by XL Gallery in the 1990s, a vast collection of catalogues and booklets of Oleg Kulik’s exhibitions, Dar Gallery booklets, as well as recordings and ephemera left after the exhibitions of Dmitri Prigov, Oleg Kulik, Andrei Monastyrsky, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Tatyana Hengstler, Dmitry Gutov, Tatyana Liberman, Vladimir Dubossarsky, Alexander Vinogradov and Nikita Alexeev among others.

The archive of Moscow Art Magazine also contains a vast collection of documents on Viktor Misiano’s own curating projects, including his work at the Center for Contemporary Art in Yakimanka, the 1995 and 2003 projects for the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the conference The Big Project for Russia (2004), which later developed into the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Moscow Art Magazine

The journal of contemporary art for the professional community published since 1993. The chief editor is Viktor Misiano, a renowned curator, awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Helsinki University for Art and Design. A major platform for art criticism in post-perestroika Russia, the journal has published artist manifestos and essays by some of the key figures of the 1990s art scene, such as Alexander Brener, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Alyona Martynova and Giya Rigvava-as well as the first Russian translations of some of the key philosophical texts and theoretical writings on contemporary art by authors such as Rosalind Krauss, Germano Celant and Nicolas Bourriaud among others. Ludmila Bredikhina, Irina Kulik, Ekaterina Degot, Andrey Kovalev and Evgenia Kikodze were among the main contributors to the debate on some of the key issues of contemporary art that unfolded on its pages. Since its beginnings, Moscow Art Magazine has remained the only Russian periodical entirely devoted to the theory and philosophy of contemporary art.

Materials from this archive are currently being catalogued and digitized and will be published at a later date.