The 11th International Book Arsenal Festival announces the Event Program which includes about 100 events that will take place on the first floor of the Mystetskyi Arsenal. The events of the Book Arsenal program will become a meeting place and a space for sincere conversations, for contemplating upon our experience, and discussing the future.

The Book Arsenal will start on Thursday, June 22. On the first day of the festival, 10 events will take place: discussions, poetry readings, film screenings, children’s program, and musical events. On June 22nd, the festival will run from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

The official opening of the 11th International Book Arsenal Festival will take place on June 22 at 5:00 p.m. On this day, the program will continue with the discussion “Democracy and War” within the focus theme “When Everything Matters”.

As part of the literary program, the discussion “Our Crimea: On the Book Pages” and poetry readings “Pixelated Poetry” will become the highlights of the first day.

For kids and teens, the program of the first festival day includes a workshop by the Art Studio Agrafka.

Visitors will also have a chance to watch short films about Kyiv — six stories about the city “How Can I Not Love You 2.0” by Takflix online cinema, as well as listen to “DJ-set. Borys”.

Finally, on the opening day, there will be a concert of the “Renaissance” Chamber Orchestra of the Mariupol Chamber Philharmonic. The event will take place in cooperation with the Ukrainian Institute.

The Focus Theme “When Everything Matters”, curated by Nataliya Gumenyuk, includes 8 events. Our values and current experience, what is going on with us, with the society, with the country, and with the world will be discussed during four days of the festival. It is a space for recognizing, as well as creating a new civic vocabulary for the things that we have not yet verbalized. This is a place where, by reflecting on our current experience, we will be able not only to comprehend, but also to word ourselves and what is going on with us.

The program is implemented with the support of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna, Austria) within the Documenting Ukraine project.

The Literary Program “Transforming the Experience into Memory”, curated by Iryna Slavinska, will be the largest at the 11th Book Arsenal. The program will present various voices of the literary scene — diaries, documentary notes, and fiction, texts by professional writers and those who started writing only after February 2014 and February 2022. And also poetry, which once again has become the cutting edge on which words are formed today that we will use tomorrow to tell about our experiences.

The Program for/about Kids and Teens “When the War Is Not Only in Books” offers a safe and friendly space for communication, reading, and discussion of children’s books and stories written and published in times of war. Among the events of the program are a marathon of authors’ readings by children’s writers, a public interview of the Mystetskyi Arsenal’s youth council with Iryna Slavinska, a performance “Knyhodruziachennia-Peredbachennia”, and workshops for parents. Yuliia Kozlovets is the curator of the program.

Partner of the program is BaraBooka. Space of Ukrainian Children’s Literature.
The program is implemented with the support of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, SCBWI.

The Professional Program of the Book Arsenal, curated by Oksana Karpiuk, will be a meeting place for the representatives of the industry, and will provide a platform for public discussions, formulating requests and searching for solutions, exchange of knowledge and experience. Within the program, we will talk about government policies and the role of specialized institutions in the book industry, business models that give publishers sustainability, as well as the role of small independent bookstores in promoting reading and building civil society.

The program is supported by the Goethe-Institut Ukraine.

The Special Program “(non)public libraries” by the Literary Laboratory of the Mystetskyi Arsenal, curated by Dima Kazakov, will be about little travelling, homeless libraries, real and online archives, collecting, personal book and vinyl collections, curated shelves, and zines. The special program “(non)public libraries” is about the sound of our time and how to transmit it, communicate it, and not interrupt it.

The PEN Ukraine Special Program “Memory Speaks” will present 5 events; in particular, on the first day of the 11th Book Arsenal, the presentation of the military diary by the late Volodymyr Vakulenko will take place.

The Dovzhenko Centre Special Program “Literary Movie Canon. Volume One” will present three films based on iconic literary works: “The Dream”, based on Taras Shevchenko’s poem, the crazy screen adaptation of Mykola Hohol’s “The Eve of Ivan Kupala”, and the epic film production of “Zakhar Berkut” by Ivan Franko. Each of them shows how Ukrainian filmmakers managed to bring to the screens the important themes of national history and issues of Ukrainian identity despite the censorship and the ideological distortions made by the Soviet ruling party.

The visual component of the 11th Book Arsenal will be represented by 7 exhibition projects:

• “Protective Layer” by Kostiantyn Zorkin;
• “Ukraine: Symbols of Resistance” by Maria Kinovych;
• “When Everything Matters” by Pictoric Illustrators Club;
• “The Eye of the Storm”, an exhibition of Israeli and Ukrainian illustrators of children’s books;
• “The Chronology of Russification” by the Liguicide project;
• “Calligraphy and Font 2022-2023” by the the calligraphy school “Art i Ya”;
• The Reckoning Project.

Visitors of the festival will also have an opportunity to see the exhibition “Forms of Presence” which has been running in the right wing of the Mystetskyi Arsenal since April 2023, and the “pro(movy)” exhibition, which will be presented by the Laboratory of Contemporary Art “Mala Gallery of the Mystetskyi Arsenal”.

In the nearest days, tickets for the 11th Book Arsenal Festival will be sold online on our website. Follow the news on our website and social networks.

The International Book Arsenal Festival (IBAF) is an annual event organized by the Mystetskyi Arsenal since 2011. During this decade it has become one of the most influential literary and art events in Eastern Europe. In 2019, IBAF won The Literary Festival Award of The London Book Fair International Excellence Awards 2019. The mission of the Book Arsenal Festival is to create such interactions between people, communities, and institutions when the combination of aesthetic experience and intellectual engagement in the context of the book enhances the ability of man and society.

Ukrainian and international managers and curators of important literary, book, and cross-disciplinary events of the world will be sharing their experience and discussing events in the new reality.

The Alteration: Festival to Festival Online Programme that will take place on May 5th – 7th is organized by the team of the Book Arsenal and the Ukrainian Institute and supported by the European Union.

Key questions will include:

• Where is the festival movement heading nowadays?
• How can literary festivals of different countries cooperate and interact?
• How can social impact be achieved, and how to build relationships with communities in a pandemic?
• What online tools and formats proved to be successful?

This first sectoral event of the Alteration programme sets a high standard of organisation and participation. It involves major European book festivals and their most advanced Ukrainian peers. We look forward to a discussion that will highlight best practices and survival strategies for literature festivals, through the pandemic lens and beyond

said Tetiana Shulha, sector manager for culture at the European Union Delegation to Ukraine.

The project contributes to the development of international relations within the professional community and to better recognition of Ukraine on the international culture scene. Among its goals are the following: establishing contacts with international institutions/festivals / exhibitions and implementing the program with educational components to enhance the competencies of Ukrainian and foreign participants.

Literary managers from London or Vilnius now meet the same challenges as their colleagues from Kyiv or Lutsk: how to create quality content and reach the audience in the context of social distancing, how to ensure the unforgettable atmosphere of connectedness. We offer the participants a sincere conversation about the effectiveness of tools and instruments, ways to interact with communities and stakeholders, to form the visitors’ experience at a distance or within quarantine restrictions

said Oksana Khmeliovska, Curator of the Professional Development Programs at the Book Arsenal Festival.

Ukrainian participants will have a chance to get acquainted with international colleagues and to explore future cooperation with them.

We wish the cooperation between Ukrainian and international festivals to grow and expand bilaterally – so that Ukrainian festivals are integrated into the global context, and foreign festivals work more closely with Ukraine. When the world has gotten even closer thanks to the online, we cannot lose the opportunity to make the communities acquainted and help them network

said Anastasia Denysenko, Literature Programme Manager at Ukrainian Institute.

The International Book Arsenal Festival has been held annually since 2011. It is an important cultural event in Ukraine, where the book, music, performative and visual art scenes interact, important issues of human existence, as well as society and culture, are raised and reflected, prompting the proactive position of the participants and visitors. The festival is organised by the Mystetskyi Arsenal. The project takes place within the professional development programs of the Book Arsenal Festival.

The Ukrainian Institute is a public institution affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. The mission of the Ukrainian Institute is to strengthen Ukraine’s international standing through the means of cultural diplomacy. We facilitate international connections between people and institutions and create opportunities for Ukraine to interact and cooperate with the world.

Background: The event is implemented within the framework of Alteration Programme. It consists of a series of online events aimed at supporting the cultural and creative sector to recover after the covid crisis. It is run by the Ukrainian Institute and supported by the EU via the Cultural Relations Platform (CRP). CRP is an EU-funded project launched in April 2020, designed to support the European Union to engage in international cultural relations. It provides a renewed approach based on a set of shared principles, and new activities, aiming to promote and facilitate sustainable cultural exchanges, people-to-people activities, and co-creation processes between Europeans and citizens from countries all over the world. The CRP activities range from policy support for EU Institutions to supporting cooperation between European and global cultural and creative sectors as well as strengthening communities of practitioners through dedicated trainings and enhanced exchanges.

For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected].