ABSTRACT
The history of curating in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods is a field of research that has received little attention to date in academia or in practice. Reconstructing the way that mechanisms of control affected postmodern art institutions of the 1990s–2000s helps understand the specifics of interactions between artists and curators in contemporary Russia. By the early 2000s, the emphasis on the importance of ideology and concept became embodied in a telling conflict between the tropes of the “unruly artist” and the “controlling curator.” The growing significance of the new figure of gallery curator as intellectual, theoretician and generator of concepts paradoxically merged with the memory of the Soviet meaning of the term “curator”. The catalog, which was published in both Russian and English, contained a curatorial manifesto and detailed texts by the participants in which they discussed their personal experience of resistance to male curators and directors in established art spheres.
