All images from the series Promised Butterflies © Masha Sviatahor.
Masha Sviatahor is a Belarusian artist working with photography, archival materials, collage and photomontage. Her practice explores history, collective memory, and questions of power and ideology. Her first book, Everybody Dance! (2025), was published by TAMAKA. Her work has been exhibited at Yale University and Circulation(s) Festival, and she was named a BJP One to Watch in 2021. Here, she discusses her practice in her own words.
“I’ve been working with Soviet photographic archives since 2018. In my earlier works I was interested in repetition, fragmentation, dismantling and reassembling familiar motifs – ballerinas, workers, soldiers, political leaders – as a way of investigating how their original ideological meanings could be undermined and recontextualised. With Promised Butterflies, my focus shifted more directly towards images of political power and collective unity.
What first drew me to these archives was their visual language. I became fascinated by how carefully these photographs were constructed: the choreography of bodies, gestures and expressions, the recurring compositions, the precision with which every element seems to reinforce the others. Although I work with Soviet archival material, my interest extends beyond that particular historical moment. The archive is really a point of entry into broader questions about how images shape collective perception, construct ideas of order and authority, and produce shared belief.
The photographs I use depict carefully orchestrated collective rituals, an idealised façade of power and society. What struck me wasn’t only how widely these images circulated, but how strongly they resembled one another. That repetition is essential because it creates familiarity. Particular visual ideas are repeated until they begin to feel natural or inevitable. Spectacle makes those ideas emotionally persuasive. Political power often operates through these visual strategies, not simply by telling people what to think, but by shaping how reality itself is seen and experienced.
I approach these archival photographs as constructions, as systems built through repetition, omission and visual discipline. What interests me is creating a situation where these endlessly reproduced political ceremonies and images of collective unity begin to lose their stability. In Promised Butterflies I introduce an element that interrupts the internal logic of the image and reveals how vulnerable these systems actually are. Something that initially appears coherent, unified and controlled starts to fracture. The image no longer functions as a stable whole.
“I want the tension between the original photograph and my intervention to remain visible because the work emerges through that encounter. I’m not adding truth” – Masha Sviatahor
It’s also difficult to know whether transformation becomes stuck, whether it’s endlessly deferred, or whether it takes place in a distorted way, producing these alien, disproportionate and unsettling forms through which monumental political scenes suddenly begin to appear fragile. A giant caterpillar appearing on a party tribune makes the entire political ritual feel temporary, staged and theatrical. It almost becomes an image of political spectacle itself.
What interests me is the collision between two different modes operating within the work. On one side there is politics, with its aspiration towards control, stability and permanence. On the other there is the organic, which follows its own logic and can never be completely controlled. Images of power often contain something that resists their own internal order. The forms I introduce simply make that resistance visible.
The title Promised Butterflies points to the gap between what is promised and what is ultimately delivered. In the Soviet context there was a constant promise of change, progress and a brighter future. Those promises were sustained through ideology, images and collective rituals, yet there was always a discrepancy between how that future was represented and how it was actually experienced. Change certainly happened, but it never coincided with the utopian future that had been promised. Transformation failed to fulfil its own promise. Instead it appeared as simulation, distortion or failure. Promises became visual constructions that remained unrealised.
That tension feels equally present today. Political systems continue to produce narratives of renewal and progress, but the question is how those narratives materialise in practice and what kinds of realities they actually produce. We live in a period of continuous transformation that is often impossible to fully comprehend or control. At the same time, we seem to exist in a prolonged state of expectation; waiting for wars to end, for authoritarian regimes to collapse, for violence to cease. Those transformations are repeatedly postponed, interrupted or emerge in distorted forms. Transformation never fully conforms to the systems that seek to organise or appropriate it.
Working with photographs made by other people inevitably raises questions of authorship, but for me it begins with the archive itself. The images I work with are not neutral. They were created as instruments of ideology. They didn’t simply document the world, they helped shape what people were encouraged to believe and how history itself was understood.
My role isn’t to claim authority over those images or erase them. I want the tension between the original photograph and my intervention to remain visible because the work emerges through that encounter. I’m not adding truth. Instead I create a layer through which what has been excluded or suppressed can return – not literally, but as something that was never supposed to appear. Rather than analysing these systems from a distance, I intervene in them physically, revealing not propaganda itself, but the mechanisms through which it operates and eventually begins to break down.
These photographs also changed the way I think about the period they come from. I worked mainly with the archives of Sovetskoe Foto [at one time the only photography magazine in the Soviet Union, founded in 1926 and published in Moscow], material that had already been selected, edited and arranged within broader ideological frameworks. Gradually I became more aware of recurring visual structures through which particular values were communicated. I became increasingly interested in the tensions, inconsistencies and omissions concealed within these apparently stable systems. The archive stopped feeling like a fixed record of history and became something that could be reopened, questioned and read differently.”
