Curated by Yana Prezlyata
The Ukrainian Visual Book is a project initiated by Pavlo Gudimov and Diana Klochko. The platform of UVB aims to distribute, implement and popularize publications in which images play no less important role than text, and sometimes they can even serve as the main narrative tools. This category includes: books on art, illustrated fiction, non-fiction, comic books, art albums, and artbooks. The defining and unifying feature for all the books of the UVB project is their aesthetic component, which consists in visual material that not only accompanies the text, but also provides the books with a new semantic content.
In almost two years of its existence, the UVB platform has showed that the book is not only text in the first place, and has proven that the illustrative narrative is far from playing a secondary role. However, because of the distinct lack of such kind of books in our country and the biased attitude to it as to a progressive element in the creative economy, visual books need further lobbying and demonstration of high potential in the cultural field.
The thematic platform at the Book Arsenal Festival 2018 will combine visual books of small publishing houses and provide a forum for discussion around the issue of contemporary editions. The program includes public talks with authors, meetings, presentations and discussions on the urgent aspects of art. One of the key events will be the Last Judgment, where leading designers will reveal the mistakes made by publishers while creating books, giving the available examples.