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 double debut: it marks both the first publication by artist Masha Sviatahor and the premiere release from the independent publishing house TAMAKA.
Masha Sviatahor explores the intersection of political critique and historical memory through her use of manual collage and photomontage, drawing on Soviet archival imagery to create layered, often surreal narratives. Her work investigates how repetition, fragmentation, and reassembly of familiar motifs—such as ballerinas, soldiers, and political leaders—can both undermine and recontextualise their original ideological meanings.
The book represents the culmination of Sviatahor’s seven-year creative journey, beginning with her accidental encounter with the Sovetskoe Foto magazine archive in 2018 and concluding with the creation of digital collages that comprise the book’s final chapter. Excessively large type font reminiscent of newspaper headlines, elements disrupting the text, and emotional close-ups—all these re-create a sense of discomfort and conflict, being the main driver of Sviatahor’s political art critique.
Readers are invited to become equal participants in this process: they are encouraged to overcome internal resistance and physically destroy one of the works in the book, which is invisibly cut into a sticker pack of ballerina figures—the book’s central visual motif. Thus, the reader completes the cycle of destruction–creation–destruction, turning a finished work back into raw material.
The book’s sections correspond to the series of works in chronological order, from the very first Everybody Dance! series—which gave the book its title—to the final digital collage series Coda. The latter was created specifically for the book, transforming elements drawn from one of the early works into a kaleidoscope of marching ballerinas. Section headers (Schmutztitel) are unique graphic objects made by the artist from ‘empty frames’—the last artefacts of magazine pages left after collage work. An empty frame also concludes the book as the back cover, symbolising the completion of the project and the end of this creative period.
The cover of each book is arranged by the artist herself in a single, unrepeatable manner by placing different collage images on top of it. No two copies are exactly alike, making each a collectible object.