Street art archive

Igor Ponosov is an artist, curator, and street art theorist, co‑founder and editor of the project Partizaning. He started out as a graffiti artist in 1999, publishing books on street art in Russia and the post‑Soviet countries, curating the urban art project Stena and the festival of grassroots initiatives Delai Sam, organizing conferences, and taking part in education programs about street art. The archive he gathered from 1998 to 2020 includes graffiti zines, newspapers, hip hop magazines, articles on the Russian graffiti scene, catalogues and books about street artists such as Pasha 183, Kirill Lebedev (Kto), and TOY. It also features rare publications released for actions by the Partizaning movement and for the Delai Sam festival, as well as preparatory materials for books that Ponosov helped publish.

An important part of the archive is made up of photographs of “urban phenomena"-collections of forms produced by the painting over of graffiti (buffing) in Moscow‑and social graffiti; of city‑endorsed propaganda murals; of walls; of comments and dialogues on the walls by the entrance to Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, where the project Stena took place; and of exhibitions, festivals, fairs, and street art objects. The collection of ephemera in the archive includes flyers, posters, and other printed matter for projects that feature street artists, texts on street artists, and texts and interviews produced for exhibitions. The archive also contains unique street art objects: studies and printed photographs of works by Konstantin Danilov (Zmogk), his badges and certificates, and rare stickers by Kirill Lebedev (Kto), A.D.E.D., Artmossfera, and Dima Gred.

About the founder

Igor Ponosov (b. 1980, Nizhnevartovsk) is an artist, curator, and street art theorist. He started out as a graffiti artist in Kiev in 1999. He is the author and co‑author of several publications on street art and since 2010 has given talks on the subject at various forums and conferences and curated a number of education programs focused on street art. In 2011 he co‑founded the Partizaning movement, and from 2011 to 2013 curated Stena, a discussion platform on urban art. From 2013 to 2016 he curated the Art Activism section at the festival Delai Sam. Ponosov has curated exhibitions and festival projects in Berlin, Bishkek, Kazan, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. His books include Art and the City (2016, in Russian) and Russian Urban Art: History and Conflicts (2018). He is a winner of the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize (2016). He lives and works and Moscow.