Free

On Saturday, February 17th from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, please join Arcana: Books on the Arts for a book signing with Yelena Yemchuk to celebrate the publication of Malanka.

If you cannot attend and would like to order a signed copy to have shipped or to pick up at Arcana, please place your order here.

“Ukrainian-born, Brooklyn-based photographer and painter Yelena Yemchuk is most commonly known for her fashion and portrait photographs, which have appeared in Italian and Japanese Vogue, V, the New Yorker and The New York Times. Yemchuk makes images that teeter on the threshold between her Eastern European heritage and her daily life in New York; between fiction and reality; between the grand beauty of 1960s cinema and the social and built environments of post-Soviet realms. As with all of her work, Malanka is a personal, feminine, surrealist and magical project. The eponymous tradition is a pre-Christian folklore ritual driving out winter and welcoming spring, an ancient custom reminiscent of Persephone’s return in Greek mythology. It is celebrated on January 14th, the old New Year in the Julian calendar, by ethnic Romanians in western Ukraine. In 2019 and 2020, Yemchuk traveled to Crasna (Krasnoilsk in Ukrainian) to document the night-long festival. Accompanying Yemchuk’s striking photographic documentation is a poetic essay by Romanian cultural journalist Ioana Pelehatai.”