Mobile Archive in Yekaterinburg and Nizhniy Novgorod
Mobile Archive, a large video art collection of the Israeli center for Digital Art, that was presented in St Petersburg in the spring 2014 by TOK at Pro Arte foundation travels further to two other Russian cities. In the end of September 'Mobile Archive' will open for public in the Ural branch of the national Center for Contemporary Arts in Yekaterinburg and in November it will be on view in the Arsenal in Nizhniy Novgorod. The project in the both cities will be accompanied by a parallel program that will icnlude lectures, artist taks and screenigs.
The Mobile Archive is a traveling collection of Israeli video art that belongs to the Israeli Center for Digital Art and contains more than 2500 titles. The archive includes video art, sound art, film, and documentation of performances and installations by Israeli and international artists in the field of media art. Many of the works are linked thematically through questions of identity, militarism, and nationalism, as well as other sociopolitical issues relevant to the region.
The idea of the Mobile Archive surfaced during several conversations on the idea of bringing the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Video Archive to the Kunstverein in Hamburg. The question was how it could function out of its original context – how to make the archive dynamic and valuable to the local audiences at both ends. Starting in Hamburg in 2007, the Mobile Archive began its journey and has since been represented as an independent project as well as a part of various art events at more than 20 venues including Hamburg Kunstwerein, WYSPA Institute of Art in Gdansk, Art in General in New York, Centro Da Ciltura Judaica in Sao Paulo and many others. In Russia, where the Mobile Archive arrives for the first time, it is curated by the Creative Association of Curators TOK (St Petersburg).
One of the main principles of the Mobile Archive is its accessibility and openness to the public at large: the archive is presented in a video library format, where each visitor will be able to choose freely from hundreds of existing video works, and view the selected pieces. Thus, the Mobile Archive raises the issue of the active role of the audience as well as touches upon the important question of storing and passing knowledge in the society today, including the mission of archives in these processes.