The Museum of Matches is an interdisciplinary project that explores the Cold War, its antecedents and its legacy through visual art, documents, photographs, books, memorabilia, and publications.
Developed by multi-media artist Sasha Chavchavadze, the Museum of Matches translates Cold War history into visual forms using the wooden match, a disappearing artifact, as its central visual element. The project explores other meanings of the word “match”: a symmetrical relationship and an adversarial game, starting with the Cold War adversarial relationship between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
The Museum of Matches was inspired by a match game described in Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory and by a match game invented by Chavchavadze’s father as a boy and played throughout his career as a Cold War CIA operative.
On the Web: Museum of Matches
