Everybody Dance!

Everybody Dance! The First Book by a New Independent Art Publisher Everybody Dance! is a double debut: it marks both the first publication by Belarusian artist and photographer Masha Sviatahor and the premiere release from the independent publishing house TAMAKA, founded in 2025. Artist Masha Sviatahor explores the intersection of political critique and historical memory through her innovative use of 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 Soviet Photo magazine archive in 2018 and concluding with the creation of digital collages, comprising the book’s final chapter. Excessively large type reminiscent of newspaper headlines, elements disrupting the text, emotional close-ups – all these re-create a sense of discomfort and conflict, 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 (The Kiss), 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 series, Everybody Dance!, which gave the book its title, to the final digital collage series, Coda. The latter was created specifically for the book, transforming the early Brezhnev’s Dance 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 books are exactly alike, making each a collectible object. Work on the book lasted almost a year. Thanks to the creative team – artist Masha Sviatahor, designer Alexey Murashko, researcher Maya Hristova, and the TAMAKA team – the book became a manifesto for the publisher in terms of artistic quality, design and printing standards.