ist publishing
We curate exhibitions, organize festivals, and workshops. We're passionate about creating visually captivating storytelling around socially relevant topics.
Before the Future marks the return of the Pavilion of Ukraine to the Biennale Architettura 2023 after a nine-year absence. The catalog contains texts and images by the curators and collectives, as well as additional articles and essays that expand on the discussions initiated within the project.
In the exhibition and its accompanying program, the grass-covered defensive earthworks in the Giardini and the dark, enclosed shelter in the Arsenale are spaces for Ukrainian architects and practitioners from various fields to raise questions—questions about telling stories during wartime, about the value of collective action in the face of threat, about the multitude of topics that unite architects in Ukraine today, about questions that must be asked today, before the future.
Over a period of four months, five temporary collectives create a program of changing exhibitions in both locations of the Pavilion—about reconstruction, ecology, care, commemoration, and the future. These exhibitions originate from within the Ukrainian context and involve a wide range of participants, with the aim of creating spaces and dialogues fostering mutual understanding.
The photobook “Chips: Ukrainian Naїve Mosaics of the 1950–90s” by photographer Yevgen Nikiforov and art historian Polina Baitsym records a vanishing phenomenon on the periphery of art and public life. The archive, collected between 2013 and 2023 and conceived as a book in 2019, presents mosaics by unknown authors in a state of half-decay—when they have already lost their initial glow, are decaying, or are disappearing into the lower layers of facades and city panoramas. Naïve mosaics are often a mundane backdrop for local residents, or an uncomfortable and problematic material for the transformation process of public spaces. The book focuses on them as a phenomenon that raises questions about memory and space, past and present, self-expression and imitation, and captures the fragility of the monumental, which, like chips, eventually became crumbs at the bottom of the package.
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.
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