One of the defining features of totalitarian or authoritarian regimes is that they know that they cannot possibly live up to the seemingly lofty ideals they aspire to reach. The Soviet Union’s communist paradise was as unrealistic and unreachable as the fascist glorified past that now is talked about so much. But any regime needs visuals: images that convey its inherent goodness, its power, and the nobility of its aspirations.
Democracies can typically afford to be relaxed about its visuals (even though its public art is mostly cringe worthy): they don’t have to be perfect or powerful because the messiness of democracy in action means that there always is room for improvement (resulting in opportunities for people). Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, however, must present perfect visuals because anything less than perfection is seen as a weakness (the very weakness that is caked into their systems).
This is not to say that democracies do not have any weaknesses. But democracies can allow for those weaknesses to exist. As we’re now witnessing, the moment that mechanism is broken — for example through the imposition of a totalitarian economic system such as neoliberalism, democracies start unraveling rapidly.
One of the crucial aspects to how political regimes present themselves is that the visuals make sense to those in the system, but they can look outlandish, even bizarre, to those outside. It’s not necessarily a clownish outlandishness (even though that certainly can be present as well). If totalitarian and authoritarian regimes only presented clownish visuals, they would have no appeal even to those living under them.
This fact is connected to how visuals, in particular images, work: their meaning can never be fixed enough so that every person views them in exactly the same fashion. Meanwhile, the underlying mechanisms can be found in very different contexts.
For example, if you wanted to you could connect the dominant imagery produced by Nazi Germany to imagery coming out of Hollywood. After all, imagery that projects a sense of power is widely used for all kinds of purposes. As a consequence, as revolting as Leni Riefenstahl’s work was (not even to mention the regime she glorified), her imagery still fascinates many people — including people whose political affiliations are far from the Nazi regime.
In much the same fashion, imagery produced by the Soviet Union, a regime that was also responsible for mass atrocities and the deaths of millions of people, still fascinates, in particular those who never had to deal with even just indirect consequences of that regime.
One way to subvert how images work is by juxtaposing them in a way they were not intended to. That this was a revolutionary way to work with images was realized in the early 20th Century already when collage/montage first made its appearance. Early collage artists quickly realized the power of their endeavour: armed with little more than a bunch of newspapers and magazines, scissors, and some glue they could subvert the societies they lived in just by making new images.
This mechanism still works, but it has become a lot harder because the goal post has moved considerably. It is one thing to make dada images in a world where television or cinema do not exist and where an imperial regime is collapsing. It’s quite another to do so in this postmodern world that is flooded by incongruous combinations of images on the small screens we hold in our hands every single day.
Everybody Dance! by Masha Sviatahor is the debut publication by Tamaka, a new publishing venture whose goal it is to showcase (in their words) “exceptional but underrepresented authors with Belarusian background”. The book showcases collages produced from source material found in Sovetskoe Foto, the Soviet Union’s photography magazine.
Looking around online to learn more about the artist, I came across the following, which — and this is my age showing — amused me: “It is interesting to mentioned that the artist creates her photomontages manually, deliberately abandoning digital technologies, which evokes the metaphor of the fabric of history.” (source) I suppose collage now mostly entails using a computer? And how exactly does cutting images by hand evoke the fabric of history? (I know that I shouldn’t ask too many questions. I will stop now.)
The materiality of Sviatahor’s work is enhanced in the book as well, with a set of spreads showcasing raw materials and cuttings. Earlier this year, I wrote a longer piece on the relationship between collage and what people call “generative AI” to produce new images. Without going into all of the details, one of the crucial differences is that with manual collage, you show your hands (or rather the outcome of what those hands did) — and that’s also crucial when you want to make art.
But this is a different world now, with digital technologies automatically assumed to be the default approach. That’s not necessarily bad, but it risks losing sight of some aspects that can be extremely important, for example when discussing collage.
Regardless, in her work Sviatahor moves between two poles. One pole is the one first established by Hannah Höch, where an artist distills a series of image fragments into something that takes on a life of it own. The other pole revolves more around graphic design than around art (not that graphic design cannot be art — however important it is, though, it mostly is not). In those cases, the new images appear to mostly live from their form: the way they are constructed.
I don’t necessarily want to come up with a theory of collage, especially since other people are much more well suited for this. What I will say is that I think that collage works best when you do not overthink things and when you allow yourself to find the right balance between the source material and your larger vision for it.
What I mean by that is that if you’re too worried about the overall organization of the frame, then that formal element threatens to overwhelm what a viewer might take from a collage image. In Sviatahor’s best collages, that’s not the case. There, the sometimes quirky, sometimes unsettling juxtaposition of images — or the deliberate removal of certain parts — adds up to something that gets at a larger truth.
For example, there is an image that shows former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (who like no other exemplified the rot that would ultimately take the system down) standing in front of a group of young pioneers. Sviatahor’s sole intervention was to somewhat crudely cut out the eyes and mouths of the children, resulting in a rather unsettling commentary on the Soviet system.
To what extent the book comments on present-day Belarus I am unable to tell. Before people realized who Vladimir Putin really is and what he aims for, the country used to be called Europe’s last remaining dictatorship. For sure, the country’s leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, is a Soviet character through and through. However, can collages made from Sovetskoe Foto speak of today’s Belarus? I’m not sure.
Or maybe they can, and I am unable to see it. But asking too much from a set of art works invites disappointment. So let’s not do that. Instead, I might as well instead focus on the book itself, a very handsome and ambitious production that holds a lot of promise regarding this new publisher’s future releases.
In the world of photography, there still are too many corners in the parts of Europe that before 1989 were either part of the Soviet Union or that were ruled by Soviet-approved puppets. The Iron Curtain might have come down, but I sometimes wonder whether photolandians located to the west of it have noticed.
Any exposure to the photography, art, and life experiences in eastern central and eastern Europe can only enrich our collective understanding of what Europe might actually be.
Everybody Dance!; collages/photomontages by Masha Sviatahor; essay by Maya Hristova; 164 pages; Tamaka; 2025
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