• 1 russianartarchive.net
• 2 garagemca.org
• 3 www.forschungsstelle.uni-bremen.de

1The Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN) was initiated by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow.1 The project goes beyond a single institution, aiming toward virtual integration of Soviet and contemporary art documentation from the late 20th century until the present, gathered by local experts, institutions, and collectors and stored in Russia and abroad (in particular the USA and Germany). The goal of RAAN is to integrate archival collections located in different countries and make them available for the wider public. The network crosses political borders and makes the art process internationally available for research, leaving the physical archives in situ and not concentrating the materials in one location or in the hands of one institution. The initiator of the network, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art2 was founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich. It is the first philanthropic organization in Russia to create a comprehensive mandate for contemporary art and culture. The idea to collaborate arose during discussions between Garage and two foreign institutions that preserve the personal papers of émigré artists, collectors, curators, and art historians — Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen) and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. The need for a network of archives was connected with political processes in the USSR and subsequent globalization, which in one way or another led to a situation in which many materials, valuable in the historical sense for the Russian context, ended up outside of Russia. Garage Archive Collection currently comprises over 70 archives and collections (including the institutional archive) and reflects the concept underlying the creation of the Museum’s research department and the archive as a whole: collecting primary sources on the history of contemporary art in Russia, including unofficial art of the Soviet period. The research department, which is responsible for the collection, is primarily focused on documenting the art process rather than artworks. In 2018, Garage Archive Collection opened a branch in Saint Petersburg that collects materials related to the local art scene.
The Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa – FSO)3 was founded in 1982. During the Cold War its archive served as a “safe haven” for dissidents’ personal archives and samizdat [self-publishing] from the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the GDR. Today the center has two goals: the (re)examination of societies and cultures in the Eastern Bloc and the analysis of contemporary developments in the post-Soviet region. The section for the Soviet Union and its successor states comprises roughly 600 personal archives in addition to samizdat journals and other documents, including many collections of Soviet nonconformist artists, writers, and poets. RAAN cooperates with archival institutions across Russia. Currently several organizations are actively working in the network, including Perm State Art Gallery, PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, Nizhny Tagil State Museum of Fine Arts, Togliatti Museum of Fine Art, Typography Center of Contemporary Art in Krasnodar, CC19 Center for Culture in Novosibirsk, and Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg. Taken together, the RAAN collections allow users to reconstruct the chronology of recent and past art events, as well as their participants. This information is obtained during the processing of archival materials and describing them for the database. Personalia, dates, and events serve as the basis for the researchers’ later narrative.

• 4 See Kemp-Welch, Klara. Freire, Cristina.“Artists’ Networks in Latin America and Eastern Europe,” AR (...)

3An Archive-centered approach to reconstructing and preserving the history of alternative art is more than current in the Russian context. For some time contemporary art has existed here in conditions that dictated forms of representation alternative to the white cube. This situation is not unique but is typical in conditions of political pressure on culture or economic constraints within which the artistic process has to exist. In many countries, artists have resorted to similar forms of art representation as resistance to official culture or in order to overcome the hierarchies that have developed in visual art under capitalism. Such alternative practices include apartment exhibitions, self-publishing, mail art, open air performances, and anonymous interventions in public space in the form of street art, stickers, and similar genres. In all these cases, often the only way of preserving the memory of this kind of art is an archive.4 The documents now stored in the archives of RAAN show how, since the 1950s, artists developed the above-mentioned practices in the Soviet Union and, despite restrictions, maintained creative activity in accordance with their individual criteria while simultaneously documenting their work.

• 5 Hirt, Günter. Wonders, Sascha. Lianosowo: Gedichte und Bilder aus Moskau, Munich: S-Press, 1992
• 6 Hirt, Günter. Wonders, Sascha. Präprintium: Moskauer Bücher aus dem Samizdat, Bremen: Temmen, 1998; (...)
• 7 Kukuj, Ilja. “Preserving the Thread of the Poetic Avant-Garde: The Work of Rea Nikonova and Serge S (...)
• 8 See digitized periodicals of samizdat from the archive of the Research Center of Eastern Europe on (...)
• 9 Kovalsky, Sergey. “An Abbreviated Chronicle of the Unofficial Art of Leningrad”, The Space of Freed (...)
• 10 FSO Archive, Sergey Kovalsky Papers, Galereya 1 and Galereya 2, FSO 01-272-S-3 and FSO 01-272-S-4
• 11 FSO Archive, Sergey Kovalsky Papers, “Osenniaia kvartirnaya vystavka na ul. Bronnitskoi, 14-17 noya (...)
• 12 Garage Archive Collection (Igor Makarevich archive), Po masterskim, no. 1, p. 5, IM-D5677

4Just like everywhere else, part of the artistic self-consciousness of unofficial artists in the Soviet Union was the need not to create exclusively for the desk drawer, but to be able to present their own works to the public. In order to circumvent state restrictions, as early as the late 1950s the artists of the Lianozovo group began to show their paintings among their friends at self-organized exhibitions in their homes.5 In the following decades, nonconformist artists consciously mastered alternative exhibition practices and at the same time adapted the practices of samizdat developed by unofficial literary circles.6 For example, the artist couple Rea Nikonova and Serge Segay created self-published books and magazines for artists in very small editions, which passed from hand to hand and spread between like-minded people.7 In the 1970s and 1980s, nonconformist artists produced entire unofficial series of magazines dedicated to unofficial art in the Soviet Union and art history in general, such as Transponans, Metki or Kolkhoz.8 Visual artists also turned their apartments into temporary exhibition spaces and created underground galleries.9 In the RAAN database, evidence of these aspirations now appears in the form of hand-made invitation cards and flyers or entire volumes documenting unofficial exhibitions. For example, the documentation Galereya I [Gallery I], initiated by Boris Ivanov, the former editor of the Leningrad samizdat journal Chasy [The Clock], shows the unofficial art scene in the northern capital from 1974 to 1980 (later the artist Sergey Kovalsky published the sequel, Galereya II – 80s).10 In the appendix to the painstakingly designed photo book dedicated to a three-day apartment exhibition on Bronnitskaya Street in Leningrad that took place in November 1981, the author, using the pseudonym R. Skif [Yuriy Novikov] also explained that the artists wished to capture ephemeral and improvised actions for posterity. In the accompanying text, he was addressing the “future historian” who “will face an impossible task” to investigate “an amazing phenomenon of our time, which is called apartment exhibitions.”11 The Moscow conceptualists Vadim Zakharov and George Kiesewalter portrayed the alternative art scene for the album Po masterskim [Through the Studios], placing the artists themselves at the center in order to “reveal the artist’s personality not through his works, but through his environment, through the environment of his studio.”12 Thus, they documented the atmosphere of the informal art scene not only for their circle but also for future visitors.

• 13 Agamov-Tupitsyn, Victor. Bul’dozernaia vystavka/ Bulldozer Exhibition, Moscow: Ad Marginem Press, 2 (...)
• 14 Frimmel, Sandra. Meindl, Matthias. Sasse, Sylvia. “Vom Konzeptualismus zur neuen Aufrichtigkeit. Mo (...)
• 15 Kalinsky, Yelena. Collective Actions: Audience recollections from the first five years, 1976-1981, (...)

5Regardless of whether the artists took an active political position or simply wanted to implement their personal ideas about art and creativity outside Socialist Realism, the state security agencies saw danger in their independent activity. After the open-air exhibition of unofficial artists on the outskirts of Moscow in Belyaevo on September 15 1974, which the Soviet authorities destroyed with the bulldozers and water cannon, nonconformist art became a political issue during the Cold War and increasingly found itself at the center of international attention.13 Many unofficial artists, such as Oskar Rabin, Lydia Masterkova, and other Bulldozer Exhibition participants, were forced to emigrate. Those who stayed did not stop working, even when facing ongoing restrictions and repressions. On the contrary, in the late 1970s and in the following decade they increased their efforts to get out of the underground and obtain official recognition. Artists no longer limited themselves to the adaptation of private space, but aspired to the public. A striking example of both the practice of self-archiving and the appropriation of new spaces were the so-called Poezdki za gorod [Trips out of Town] by the group Kollektivnye deistviya [Collective Actions]. By inviting people to join artistic happenings in the vicinity of Moscow and documenting them afterwards, the group created new social spaces.14 The artists were primarily interested in the experience and psychological perception of the actions, which were documented in the form of personal reviews of participants together with descriptions, images or videos of the trips.15 Due to the close ties within the local unofficial art scene, information about individual actions was not limited to the Collection Actions’ samizdat but was reflected in other alternative publications. For example, one can find documentation of the individual action Spiral’ by Nikita Alexeev not only in the samizdat typescript Trips Out of Town but also in volume nine of the art magazine Metki [Signs], founded by Vitaly Gribkov and Vladimir Petrov in 1975. The magazine published twelve issues and existed until 1980.

• 16 Novikov, Yuri. “Istoriva Gazanevskogo Dvizheniva” ; Kovalsky, Sergey. Iz Padeniya v Polet. Nezavisi (...)

6With various documents virtually combined in the RAAN archival network, it is possible to reconstruct the artistic action Spiral’ in detail. In the typewritten invitation the suburban train line at the Yaroslavsky Railway Station was indicated as the starting point for a trip to Kalistovo station on the banks of the Vorya River. The accompanying map, drawn by hand, indicated landmarks, two of which did not exist. At the finish, the participants came across a spiral with a diameter of 16 meters, made from 100 sticks with ropes between them, which they were supposed to enter. On each of the sticks there were labels with inscriptions such as “shore,” “swamp” or “country village,” as well as the phrases “fish on earth,” “butterfly wings” or concepts like “auspicious country.” The action is documented in the photographs: you can see how the conceptual artists Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin and Andrei Monastyrsky passed through the spiral or sat at its end point. Well before perestroika, alternative artists had increasingly been able to use local space for their maneuvers. In the samizdat journal Arkhiv, published by Vadim Nechaev and his wife Marina Nedrobova, one can find not only reports on apartment exhibitions and theoretical essays but also photographs of official exhibitions in which alternative artists participated, such as at the Gaz Palace of Culture in Leningrad.16

• 17 Florkovskaya, Anna. Malaia Gruzinskaia, 28: Zhivopisnaia sektsiia Moskovskogo obedinennogo komiteta (...)

7Likewise, self-archiving practices increasingly imitated traditional and official genres of art publications, such as homemade exhibition catalogues made from bought photo albums or bound by hand. George Kiesewalter’s album APTART za zaborom [APTART behind the Fence], which is in Garage Archive Collection, is an example of the genre. In fact, this album is a kind of digest of the artistic process of unofficial artists over several years. It illustrates and dates eight events from 1983 to 1986. The exhibition catalogue of the painting section of Moscow City Committee of Graphic Artists at 28 Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, which is in the Leonid Talochkin archive in Garage Archive Collection, is designed in a similar way and includes photographs by the famous chronicler of the unofficial art scene, Igor Palmin. The official exhibition hall of the Committee was one of the first compromise solutions in search of a "traditional" public space for exhibiting alternative art.17

• 18 Kantor-Kazovsky, Lola. “The Moscow Underground Art Scene in an International Perspective”, Art Beyo (...)
• 19 Parisi, Valentina. “Writing about apparently non-existent art: The samizdat journal A-Ja and Russia (...)
• 20 The Biennale of Dissent took place on 15 October -17 November 1977 and marked the 60th anniversary (...)
• 21 Parisi, Valentina. “Zwischen Unstimmigkeit und Andersdenken. Inoffizielle sowjetische Kunst auf der (...)
• 22 Maximova, Marina. Curatorial Authority and Mediation of Culture. Moscow Art Exhibitions 1974-1993, (...)
• 23 Talochkin, Leonid. Alpatova, Irina. Drugoe iskusstvo: Moscow 1956-1976, vol. 2, 1991

9Recent research highlights the importance of the West as an echo chamber for nonconformist artists from the USSR and that of information smuggled through the Iron Curtain, which played a crucial role for the developing alternative art scenes in cities such as Moscow and Leningrad.18 Unofficial periodicals, such as the journal A-Ya: Sovremennoe russkoe iskusstvo [A-Ya: Contemporary Russian Art], which was published in Paris in the period 1979-1986, made the works of the Moscow conceptualists famous in the West.19 Emigrating to the West, unofficial artists and like-minded people, such as the art critic Igor Golomstock or the philosopher and art theorist Boris Groys, whose personal archives are kept in the FSO archive, served as liaison between Soviet unofficial artists and the international art scene. Supporters and networks were especially important for those who wanted to become successful on the international art market. After Soviet conceptual and performance art was shown at the Venice Biennale20 in 1977, Soviet nonconformist art began to be exhibited in the West, becoming popular and not losing its appeal even after the fall of the Iron Curtain.21 During perestroika, from the mid-1980s, the conditions for artistic creativity in the Soviet Union changed. Nonconformist art was increasingly exhibited in official institutions. In 1987, the first major exhibition of local unofficial art, Retrospekciya tvorchestva moskovskikh khudozhnikov, 1957-1987 [A Retrospective of the Work of Moscow Artists 1957-1987], was held in two gallery spaces in Belyaevo and on Petrovsky Lines in Moscow. For the first time, it was possible to show different trends and various groups of artists, starting with the Lianozovo group mentioned above.22 In 1990, the State Tretyakov Gallery hosted a large-scale exhibition called Drugoe Iskusstvo [Other Art], presenting works from private collections and artists’ studios to a wider public, including works belonging to Moscow collector and archivist of unofficial art Leonid Talochkin, whose archive is part of Garage Archive Collection. This exhibition included a two-volume catalogue (1991), which became a reference book of the unofficial art scene.23

• 24 Röder, Kornelia. Topologie und Funktionsweise des Netzwerks der Mail Art: seine spezifische Bedeutu (...)
• 25 John, Held Jr. Small Scale Subversion: Mail Art & Artistamps, Breda: TAM, 2015

10At that time, international art movements such as Mail art existed. Mail art developed in the 1960s in the context of the Fluxus community, partially as a response to global commercialization. In authoritarian countries it played an important role in creating alternative artist’s networks and connecting seemingly impenetrable environments to the international art scene.24 By mailing handmade postcards, letters and objects, a global non-profit network of artists emerged, which anyone who considered themselves an artist could join. Within the framework of this network, lively artistic subcultures developed both in Latin America and in the socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.25 Less well-known is the fact that Mail art networks extended all the way to the Soviet periphery. From 1987, the artist couple Rea Nikonova and Serge Segay, who lived in the southern Russian city of Yeysk before their emigration to Germany in 1998, took part in mail art campaigns and were the first artists to exhibit Mail art in Russia. Their legacy contains mail art objects that, in terms of style and material, directly refer to the network-based and international nature of the movement. For example, they created handmade artists’ stamps and for Handmade Red Postcards a bundle of Soviet postal receipts for international shipment were transformed into an art object.

• 26 Obukhova, Sasha. Selina, Elena. Tarasova, Anastasia. Rekonstruktsiia/Reconstruction. 1990-2000, vol (...)
• 27 The Museum of Moscow hosted the anniversary exhibition of the gallery in 2015: https://mosmuseum.ru (...)

12The fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union shook the political world order. While artists who had emigrated to the West had been integrated into local art scenes, in the successor states of the USSR the turning point marked the final transition to contemporary art. It formed within the national context and simultaneously under the international conditions of the global art scene. In post-Soviet Russia, contemporary art immediately became an integral part of cultural life. Many galleries and centers of contemporary art emerged in the 1990s, as did the demand for a state museum of modern art in Moscow (which would appear only at the end of the decade, in 1999). This transition period is particularly well-documented in Garage Archive Collection by the collections of a number Moscow galleries of the 1990s, both of municipal (for example L Galereya) and private origin (Shkola, XL, TV Galereya, etc.).26 Despite the flourishing of Russian alternative culture and contemporary art in the 1990s, in the economic sense the art market did not become sustainable. For artists and newly-formed institutions, including contemporary art galleries, it continued to be hard to survive. By the mid-1990s, many projects in Moscow were forced to close, including the Yakimanka Contemporary Art Center, which ceased to exist in 1997. In response to these difficult conditions, in 1995, at the height of alternative culture in Moscow, Alexander Petrelli and the group Pertsy launched Galereya Pal’to [Overcoat Gallery].27 Petrelli visited exhibitions of various artists in a voluminous coat, to the lining of which he attached small-format works by colleagues whose exhibition he was visiting. These works could be purchased immediately, as they were small and fairly inexpensive. This “gallery-performance” or pop-up gallery was both an ironic reformulation of an institution into a work of art and a commercial initiative to support artists financially. Overcoat Gallery is still functioning as an independent practice of Alexander Petrelli.

• 28 For an overview see: Jonson, Lena. Art and Protest in Putin’s Russia, London: Routledge, 2015; Frim (...)

13From the early 2000s, the political situation in Russia gradually reduced the possibilities for free artistic expression.28 Alternative artists started to adapt well-known forms of activist art to these new conditions using different formats of urban interventions. Alexander Verevkin in his action-exhibition Tridcat odin [Thirty-One] (2010) supported the so-called Strategy-31, regular public gatherings for the protection of the right of freedom of assembly in Russia fixed in article 31 of the Russian Constitution. These gatherings were held on Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow on the thirty-first of every month since 2009. Verevkin supported in an artistic manner by distributing leaflets consisting of his drawings and instructions on how to behave in case of being stopped by the police.

• 29 This shift corresponds to the global trend towards relational aesthetics. Examples of this trend ar (...)

15In the last decade Russian contemporary art has shifted from protest to participation, with one aim being to create a liveable urban space.29 Contemporary art in Russia is in constant motion and has yet to be researched, while the history of Soviet nonconformist art and its main features have already been defined and awaits in-depth case studies which would explore it in detail. The Russian Art Archive Network documents both Soviet traditions and contemporary art scenes far from the capital. As an archive-based research infrastructure, RAAN helps to analyze the diversity and resilience of various alternative artistic practices in an international context and beyond temporal and spatial boundaries.