Everybody Dance! by Masha Sviatahor

Everybody Dance! brings together seven years of Masha Sviatahor’s work with Soviet photographic archives, where manual collage and photomontage transform historical imagery through intervention and reconstruction.

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 and reconstruction.

Sviatahor employs manual collage and photomontage to work with Soviet archival imagery, examining how visual culture produces and sustains ideological narratives. Working with physical images originally produced as instruments of propaganda, she intervenes directly in the archival material, treating it not as a neutral historical record but as a structure shaped by repetition, omission, and visual discipline.

By dismantling and reassembling familiar motifs—from recurring figures such as ballerinas, workers, soldiers, and political leaders to scenes of everyday life—Sviatahor creates new layered narratives that destabilise representations once presented as stable and authoritative, exposing their internal contradictions and ideological fragility.

The book unfolds through interconnected series in chronological order, from the early Everybody Dance! series—which gave the publication its title—to Coda. Across these series, the archive becomes a site of disruption and reconstruction, while collage functions as both a method and a critical tool. Opening with raw materials and cut-outs, the publication also reveals aspects of the collage-making process itself.

The publication 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 cover’s debossed area. No two copies are exactly alike, making every book a unique object.