Lunchtalk #86, 23.01.2025, 12:00-13:00 Uhr

Anna Dial
The ‘Unknown Person’ Publishing House: Community, Art and Activism - Challenges for Independent Publishers in Russia and Exile

Publisher and artist Anna Dial will share her personal experience and strategies for building an active community around her small press project ‘Unknown Person’. You can explore how print culture is intertwined with activism and contemporary art. Anna will share how she finds and publishes people’s personal textual and visual stories, which are turned into collective books and exhibitions in a former bus station hairdresser’s shop, an abandoned hotel or a construction container. The Unknown Person publishing project was founded in 2018 in Kamchatka in Russia’s Far East and has since been presented in various cities across Russia and internationally. Since 2020, through our nomadic Kafedra Gallery, artist Anna Dial and writer Roma Murashov have been organizing exhibitions, festivals, and art labs aimed at fostering cultural development and promoting press freedom. In exile since 2022, in collaboration with other activists, they have successfully conceived and implemented seven open-calls that resulted in the production of either self-published zines or group exhibitions (Montenegro, Serbia and Germany). ‘Unknown Person’ explores the book as a spatial medium through installations, video and audio performances, and public open calls. The publishing house also view the book as an object capable of capturing collective memory and the spirit of the times, bridging the gap between art activists in exile and those still living in unsafe environments. The project focuses on archiving the experiences of queer individuals, feminist authors, and those who oppose wars and all forms of discrimination. We publish personal visual and textual narratives in the forms of essays, autofiction, interviews, and poetry.