EAN – European-art.net

The European-art.net is a follow-up project of the EU project vector, which was conducted under the guidance of basis wien and is devoted to the recording and accessing of materials on contemporary art in accordance with scholarly principles.

EAN is an open association of various archives of contemporary art. All participating institutions have made it their mission to collect and preserve materials on contemporary art and to record and make them available in accordance with scholarly standards of archiving. This diverse information is made publicly available under the address www.european-art.net in the form of a portal, which went online in December 2002. The common search engine allows simultaneous queries across multiple, distributed databases. The United List of Artist Names (ULAN) of the American Getty Institute was the inspiration for this retrieval system, whose search function is still being extended and currently makes available numerous data sets on persons, groups and institutions.

In 2011 the Swiss Institute for Art Research SIK-ISEA took over management of the project from basis wien and the Swiss magazine Kunstbulletin, which had hitherto jointly performed this task. In 2017 basis wien again assumed chairmanship of the network.

Partner institutions beside basis wien, Kunstbulletin/artlog and SIK-ISEA in Zurich include documenta Archiv in Kassel, National Museum of Contemporary Art MNAC in Bucharest, Institut für moderne Kunst in Nürnberg, Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels ZADIK in Köln, Centre for Artists Publications in Bremen,   Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek der Stadt Köln and, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Archive of Fine Arts in Prague, as well as Skulptur Projekte Archives in Münster.

www.european-art.net