Rock, Banya, Museum. A Survey of Sergey Borisov’s Video Archives from Garage Archive Collection

This experimental essay, a set of TikTok videos, focuses on the video archives of Sergey Borisov, a photographer and a chronicler of the Russian unofficial art culture of the perestroika and later period. The problems raised in this essay have to do with the reflections concerning the role of documentary musical video recordings (concerts of Kino, Nautilus Pompilius, Punk festivals etc.) in the modern Russian museum discourse, in the context of the tight links between the musical underground and visual artists in Russia. The archives also include the records of the seminal Russian art events: Art against Commerce in Bitsevsky Park (1986), the first Sotheby auction in the USSR (1988), the first Moscow screening of Assa by Sergey Soloviev (1988), the legendary actionized exhibition in Sandunovsky Banya (Bathhouse), organized by KLAVA Vanguard Club, and others. Since these archival records are, essentially, object-related metadata, they are of highest value not only as sources for research work, but as museum exhibits as well.