Everybody Dance by Masha Sviatahor

For seven years, starting in 2018, the artist Masha Sviatahor worked with Soviet photographs. Her starting point was Sovetskoe Foto, the only specialist photography magazine published in the Soviet Union, from 1926 to 1991. She first came across its archive by chance.

Her method is manual collage and photomontage. She takes photographs made as propaganda, cuts them apart and reassembles them. Repeated figures such as ballerinas, workers, soldiers and political leaders are recombined until their original meaning weakens. The Bulgarian researcher Maya Hristova analyses this approach in the book and places it within contemporary art.

The book follows this work from the series that gave it its title to the final digital collage series, Coda. Together these works form what the book calls the “Collage Period”. Beyond the method, Everybody Dance! also reflects on what people experience during periods of historical upheaval.