TV Gallery Art Media Center was founded by Nina Zaretskaya and filmmaker Sergey Savushkin in 1991, originally as an independent studio. In July 1992, Zaretskaya and Savushkin announced the opening of the studio’s own space at the Center for Contemporary Art. Although its main mission was to ‘develop and produce non-commercial TV and video projects,’ TV Gallery was also the first venue in Moscow to screen video art from the USA, Germany, Japan and the UK. It was also a place where young Russian artists experimenting with new media could turn to for technical support. Artists including Alexander Brener, Kirill Preobrazhenskiy, Gia Rigvava, Sekta Absolyutnoi Lyubvi Group had their first shows in TV Gallery. The gallery also showed the work of students from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography and young artists from Emergency Exit Group based in Tsarskoye Selo. One of TV-Gallery’s key functions was documenting Moscow’s artistic life.
TV Gallery’s archive contains both documents and video material. The video archive contains video documentation of Moscow’s contemporary art scene in the 1990s. This includes videos featuring Russian and international artists (including detailed interviews recorded in the 1990’s and 2000s), and original materials used in the creation video installations by the artists who collaborated with the gallery, including: AES, Vadim Zakharov, Vladislav Efimov, Vladimir Salnikov, Leonid Tishkov, Alexander Brener. The archive also contains documentary footage of video installations on show in the gallery.
The paper archive includes portfolios of the artists who worked with TV Gallery and various materials related to its projects.