Boris Groys

»Only when the social and technical means for preserving the old appear to have been secured does interest in the new arise, for it then seems superfluous to produce tautological, derivative works that merely repeat what has long been contained in archives. Thus the new […] becomes a positive demand only after the identity of tradition has been preserved – not only putatively ideal permanence of truth, but by technical arrangements and media – and after it has been made accessible to all.«[1] (Boris Groys) 

Boris Groys (* 1947, East Berlin) is a Russian-German philosopher, art critic, and media theorist. He has had a decisive influence on the discourse on the Russian avant-garde, the art of Stalinism, and the aesthetic-intellectual concepts of post-communism. 

Boris Groys studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Leningrad from 1965 to 1971. He then worked as a research assistant at several institutes in Leningrad and, from 1976 to 1981, at the Institute for Structural and Applied Linguistics in Moscow. In 1981, he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1988, he was appointed visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. From 1989 to 1994, Groys taught as a research assistant at the Philosophy Department of the University of Münster. In 1991, he was appointed visiting professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Groys received his doctorate in philosophy in Münster in 1992. From 1994, he was professor of art history, philosophy, and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Since 2005, he was Global Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University in New York. 

With his provocative theses, Groys subjected art production under socialism to a radical reassessment. He showed that Stalinist politics continued the aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde and that there was therefore no break. He coined terms such as »Soz Art,« »Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,« and »Collective Actions.« His research focuses on iconoclasm, the relationship between media and religion, cultural archives, and philosophical concepts of care and self-care.

Boris Groys has curated numerous exhibitions, including »Images of an Empire. Life in Pre-Revolutionary Russia« (2006) and »Medium Religion« (2008–2009). In 2011, he was curator of the Russian Pavilion at the 54th Biennale di Venezia. At the ZKM, he led the research project »The Post-Communist Condition« and contributed to numerous ZKM publications as an author.

Since 2006, the archive at ZKM has held approximately five hundred audio tapes of his collected lectures at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, approximately 75 videos of his collected lectures, and the raw material for his 2008 video lectures published by Hatje Cantz, »Thinking in Loop. Three Videos on the Iconoclastic, the Ritual, and the Immortal.«

[1] Boris Groys, On the New (London: Verso, 2014).