The combined archive materials include correspondence, pieces of art and rare exhibition catalogues from well-known concept and performance artists such as Ry Nikonova, Dmitri Prigov, Ilya Kabakov and Andrei Monastyrski. They also include documents from the art theorist Igor Golomstock who initially wrote in the underground scene and then whilst in exile in London about art in totalitarianism.
Professor Susanne Schattenberg, director of the Research Centre for East European Studies (FSO), emphasizes that the inventory of the well-known media theorist Boris Groys and his wife Natalia Nikitina, which is kept in Bremen, has a central role in understanding unofficial Soviet art. “As early as in the 1970s, the native of East Berlin had formed a bridge over the Iron Curtain with his art-theoretical work and had made the alterative art of the Moscow conceptualists known in the West.” In the frame of the German-Russian-American cooperation, the married couple’s entire archive inventory was made accessible. From now on, the inventory is open to researchers, curators and the general public in the Research Centre for East European Studies.
The project website has an online catalogue, which enables users to search through all archives of all RAAN partners. In the frame of developing digitalization, new material is being added. The archive catalogue is available in Russian and German. The majority of the catalogue is in Russian with the exception of entries for archive documents and press cuttings in foreign languages and information regarding exhibitions that took place outside of (Soviet) Russia.
