Everybody Dance! by Masha Sviatahor

The book Everybody Dance! is the culmination of Masha Sviatahor’s seven-year artistic engagement with historical memory and the visual narratives of propaganda.

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 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.