Artist Vadim Zakharov’s video archive offers a unique overview of the Moscow Conceptualists. It includes documentation of over 228 solo and group exhibitions that took place in Russia and abroad in cities such as Paris, Cologne, New York, Rome, Milan, and Berlin from 1989 to 2014. The archive offers an unprecedented, nuanced, and singular view of an era when exhibition-making became the central lens through which artists could communicate with an audience. The collection contains evidence of seminal projects featuring renowned artists such as Yuri Albert, Ilya Kabakov, Yuri Leiderman, Andrei Monastyrsky, Pavel Pepperstein, Viktor Pivovarov, and Dmitri Prigov, among many others, including artists who are now otherwise lost to history.
Vadim Zakharov was born in Dushanbe, now Tajikistan, in 1959. He graduated from the Moscow State V. I. Lenin Pedagogical Institute in 1982. Zakharov regularly exhibited at APTART Gallery from 1982 to 1984. In the early 1980s, he took part in compiling the MANI (Moscow Archive of New Art) folders, and started his own collection and archive. In 1989, Zakharov moved to Germany and founded Pastor Zond Editions, which published the journal Pastor from 1992 to 2001. Zakharov is a recipient of the Innovation Prize (2006) and the Kandinsky Prize (2009), and he represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013. He divides his time between Berlin, Cologne, and Moscow.