Azbuka Strikes Back: Spring and Summer Program 2022

Children’s books and curricula have often been a hot-button, polemical issue: an ideal platform to elaborate and instill ideological positions, be they from the left and/or right. Former socialist nations in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia have a particularly rich tradition of children’s literature, as part of an effort to create solidarity amongst different peoples and cultures. However, we know how that story ended. Today, a critical 21st-century look at this legacy reveals several shortcomings concerning race, sexuality, and gender. Azbuka Strikes Back, the spring and summer 2022 public program at Pickle Bar, looks at the visual, rhetorical, and ideological tools underlying children’s publications with an aim to decolonize, revise, and queer the heritage of avant-garde education with a series of lectures, performances, workshops, and podcasts by international artists, researchers, poets.