Contemporary Art of Yakutia Archive

The archive of contemporary art of Yakutia was launched in 2010 and contains materials about important artists and events in the republic’s artistic community since the 2000s.

It is a research archive and is focused on organizing and documenting the life of Yakutia’s artistic community. The archive covers artists and independent self‑organized groups of informal art that appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s and also events and individuals who create the artistic agenda today.

Today’s art scene in Yakutia is a phenomenon involving the activities of several generations: young artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s; artists who began working in the 2000s, when Russian institutions and festivals of contemporary art were active; and artists who came on to the scene in the 2010s. The first generation includes Mikhail Starostin, Marina Khandy, Olga Skorikova, Sargylana Ivanova, Evdokia Romanova, Azalia Sorgoeva, Irina Mekumyanova, Nadezhda Fedulova, Elena Atlasova, Georgy Reshetnikov, and others.

In the early 2000s, artists who were part of the group Flogiston formed new associations (the groups Uzkii Vzglyad and Azart, which included Olga Skorikova, Ekaterina Shaposhnikova, Olga Rakhleeva, Natalya Nikolaeva, and Irina Alekseeva) that became the absolute avant‑garde of the art scene. These artists experimented with traditional culture and created new forms that contained symbols and elements of reality related to the history of the peoples of the North.

The collection comprises three main sections covering people, exhibitions and festivals, and self‑organizations.