Archival art as a genre of representation of contemporary art, as well as a way to collect information, including lost or displaced information. The goal is to create a physically present project, a way of collecting, refining or recovering found material.

Archival art acquired its development with the advent of conceptual trends in the sixties. This is due to dematerialization, concise creation, and the inability to renew the work of art. The documentation of movements such as land art and performance has become one of the possible ways to broadcast to a vast cultural audience.

In the visual arts, the archive has many functions, being an undeniable force and organizing structure of the exhibition process. The archive may take the form of a habitual collection of information for the study of a problem, or be used as a chosen theme in a work of art (sometimes using artificially created material), as well as a device for the embodiment of fictional characters or events. In this case, installation is the preferred form of implementation. The representative stream may include documentation and secondary material, photographs, audiovisual materials, sketches, letters, financial documents or exhibition materials.

The advent of the Internet and the development of the technological environment favorably influences and simplifies the work of archiving important elements of the arts, and also makes art accessible to a wider public, opens the collections of world museums for study, helps to draw attention to little-known artists and explore their art, and equalizes the art market. All this has a positive effect on the further development and growth of archives.

The artistic practice of Sergei Shabokhin is often based on the logic of the archive. The artist works with historical documentation, the theme of memory, forgotten or hidden layers of history. Often archival works have the character of "office punk", in which case there is the construction and structuring of materials, accompanied by cheap xerox production and chaotic imagery. The "Practices of Submission" cycle (2010-2018) has created a serious sociological archive of more than a thousand objects: images, documents, videos, slogans, audio files, recordings, objects of fear and evidence of repressiveness.

Sergei Shabokhin is also the editor-in-chief of Kalektar, a research non-profit platform for Belarusian contemporary art. The project engages key experts for analysis and creates a complete archive covering all key events and projects created in Belarus. The platform also publishes research and analytical articles by Belarusian experts in the art community.

In 2015, the exhibition "ZBOR. Constructing an Archive" was organized, which presented 40 important works of the period 1980 to 2014 by Belarusian artists. The same concept was used for the exhibition "ZBOR. Belarusian Art Movement", held in Kyiv in 2016. "ZBOR. In progress" the final exhibition was held in Minsk in the gallery "Ў" in 2018.

Today archival aesthetics are popular among the younger generation of artists, this aesthetic came in 2010 along with the "historical turn" in art.

The eeefff group, Zhanna Gladko, Vladimir Gramovich, Oksana Gurinovich, Andrey Dureiko, Marina Naprushkina, Problem Collective, Igor Savchenko, Olga Sosnovskaya, Maxim Tyminko, Sergey Shabokhin, Oleg Yushko and others also work with archives and archival aesthetics.