ist publishing

Znak. Ukrainian Trademarks 1960—1980 is research by U, N, A collective (Uliana Bychenkova, Nika Kudinova, Aliona Solomadina) on the history of Ukrainian graphic design, in particular, on the area of corporate identity during the period of Thaw, Stagnation, and Perestroyka.

Visual and textual narratives coexist in the book, as this type of material needs not only visual but also textual support. They address the given subject in the wider chronological order: from the 20th century avant-garde to the present. Most importantly, the publication focuses on the Kharkiv school of industrial graphics and the accomplishments of Volodymyr Pobiedin.

The publication displays archive materials, identifies the names, describes the processes and highlights the influences in Ukrainian graphic design in the local and global contexts.

I Love You is an art book about stages of maturity and about appreciating their natural manifestations, a documentary account of how the two particular peonies' rhythms of life overlap.

"One day I bought an unblown white peony from an old woman at the market. It came into blossom and got all showy and beautiful. Then, on May 24th, I bought another unblown peony from the same woman and put them in two glasses of water side by side. The first one kept bursting forth with every hour while the second had just begun unfolding its petals. The next day they were equally showy and beautiful, and two days later, the first peony withered while the second remained showy and beautiful"- Katya Lesiv.

For years, Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi has been mainstreaming the global awareness about the legacy of Russian colonialism. A few days before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he started a Twitter thread listing all Russian colonial invasions over the last century and highlighting one specific pattern that they all went by. The post has gone viral and is now dubbed the "mother of all Russian colonialism tweets". Together with a group of Ukrainian artists, Eristavi transformed it into an illustrated pocket guide to the 48 most recent invasions of Russian colonialism — to bring everyone’s attention to a pattern of serial behavior by the largest colonial empire.

Publication is prepared with the support of the MOCA NGO and the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund in collaboration with the Sigrid Rausing Trust. Some illustrations created during the illustrative workshop for the book Russian Colonialism 101 have been donated to the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA).

The profit from the sale of the first edition will be transferred to the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund.

The book Where Curating Is: The Artist-As-Curator and the Curator-As-Artist in Ukraine From the 1980s to the 2010s collects essays and interviews covering a range of issues – collective and individual – that concern curating in a Ukrainian context. These texts emerged from discussions between the author-compilers of the book and curators and contemporary artists from cities across Ukraine. They aim to show the peculiarities of curating from the perspective of the artist-as-curator, without ignoring the counterpart to this figure: the curator-as-artist.

List of artists and curators:

The Open Group, The Masoch Fund, Yuriy Leiderman, Arsen Savadov, Lesya Zayats, Mykola Ridnyi, Kseniya Hnylytska, Lada Nakonechna, Nikita Kadan, Alevtyna Kakhidze, Oleksandr Roytburd, Tiberiy Szilvashi, Serhiy Bratkov, Yuriy Sokolov, Vlodko Kaufman, Mykola Kolomiyets, Pavlo Makov, Oleksandr Solovyov, Viktor Misiano

“NA4JOPM8” — the name of the photo series by Ukrainian photographer Igor Chekachkov. It appeared after Chekachkov’s eponymous hard drive with a ten-year archive of 250,000 photographs was accidentally destroyed and later (partially) restored. The photos (that later became damaged files) went through unpredictable circumstances and deep artistic reflection. The photo book addresses Ukrainian social and political issues through personal stories of universal experiences such as loss, passion, intimacy, and loneliness. Random computer algorithms meant that Chekachkov accomplished the goal he had set and postponed for several years. He combined two vectors of his practice into one, thus consolidating private and public life images into one series.