Kurasoushchyna, my love
Masha Sviatahor
Kurasoushchyna is one of the sleeping districts of Minsk, the place where I was born and grew up. Unremarkable, displaying typical Soviet low-cost housing, a technical water reservoir popularly referred to as "a stink pot" and the railway, this neighbourhood began to develop its mythology in my imagination. I sometimes find it difficult to explain where this or that image came from or to draw a line between the reality and the play of my imagination.
Many of these works are related to my childhood memories and feelings, as well as relations with the city and modern Belarusian everyday life. In childhood, the typical and ordinary often becomes exceptional, full of mystery and magic.
The heroines of my series interact with the urban environment of Minsk and its suburbs in different ways. Some freeze in immobility and daze, in a state of drowsiness and melancholy immersing themselves in water like a dream, others hover in space, or escape from the city, flying or floating away from it. Attempts to build relationships with an alienated urban environment encourage heroines to blend in, fade into space, become part of it, assimilate, hide, find shelter, lay low. Sometimes the characters find themselves trapped, unable to influence the situation.
The scenes, largely consisting of various elements of everyday life, seem surreal, irrational and phantasmagoric on the one hand. On the other hand, these bizarre combinations reflect quite some contradictions and paradoxes of Belarusian present-day reality.
Visual artist. Born in Minsk, Belarus. Based in Paris, France.
Masha’s work has been shown internationally, including at UNFAIR in Amsterdam; Fotofestiwal Lodz; the Gallery of Contemporary Art (GfZK) in Leipzig;Arsenał Gallery in Białystok; KVOST in Berlin; Cité internationale des arts; Circulation(s) festival in Paris, etc.
Her work has been featured in British Journal of Photography, Fisheye Magazine, Der Greif, De Standaard, WePresent, etc.
She is one of the recipients of the Prince Claus Seed Award 2021.
Everybody Dance! Book
Everybody Dance! is a publication rooted in Masha Sviatahor’s work with archival photography, manual collage, and photomontage. Bringing together works developed over seven years from Soviet photographic archives, with the magazine Sovetskoe Foto serving as a primary source, the book reflects an artistic engagement with historical imagery and its transformation through intervention, reconfiguration, and reinterpretation.
Sviatahor employs manual collage and photomontage to work with archival photographs, intervening directly in historical material by dismantling and reassembling existing images. Working with photographs originally produced as instruments of propaganda, she treats the archive not as a neutral historical record but as a structure shaped by repetition, omission, and visual discipline.
Using recurring motifs — from figures such as ballerinas, workers, soldiers, and political leaders to scenes of everyday life — Sviatahor investigates how their original ideological meanings can be undermined and recontextualised. Reconfigured into new layered narratives, these elements begin to unsettle representations once presented as stable and authoritative, exposing internal contradictions and ideological fragility.
The book unfolds through interconnected series arranged in chronological order, from the early Everybody Dance! series — which gives the publication its title — to the final digital collage series Coda, created specifically for the book. Across these series, the archive becomes a site of disruption and reconstruction, with collage functioning as both method and critical tool.
Opening with raw materials and cut-outs, the publication also reveals aspects of the collage-making process itself. The book itself becomes part of this process, inviting readers to physically intervene in one of its central works and transform a completed image back into raw material.
Each copy of the book is further personalized by the artist through the manual placement of different collage-image stickers within the debossed area of the cover. No two copies are identical, making every book a unique object.
Artist: Masha Sviatahor
Text: Maya Hristova
Publisher: TAMAKA
Editors: Masha Sviatahor, Alexey Murashko
Designer: Alexey Murashko
Edition: 400 copies
Language: English
Printed by: Jelgavas tipogrāfija in Latvia
Cover: Hardcover
Pages: 164Size: 24 × 33 cm
Release Date: August 2025
ISBN: 978-3-00-082885-0 (EN)