As part of the joint fellowship program with the Goethe Institut, two young researchers are joining the documenta archiv team for the second time for six months.

Curator Yana Gaponenko (Vladivostok) is researching cultural-political developments and connections on both sides of the "Iron Curtain" using documenta as an example. Her research, which she has been pursuing in the documenta archiv since August 2022, focuses not only on the inner-German lines of tension between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR, but also on artists' biographies of exiles and dissidents during the Cold War, as well as on the policy of cultural Russification inside the USSR.


Helga Lyubartovich (Saint Petersburg) is an art historian and archivist at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Nonconformist Art in Saint Petersburg. Since the beginning of October, she has been researching the topic of "ephemera" in the holdings of the documenta archiv in Kassel. The focus thus lies on daily printed matter such as brochures, leaflets, press releases, invitations or admission tickets, which sometimes possess unexpected meaning and - even at a great distance in time - can open up new perspectives on exhibition activities.