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 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 (see Match Game).