THE BOOK ARSENAL FESTIVAL HAS LAUNCHED THE CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The International Book Arsenal Festival has launched the call for applications for participation in the exhibition fair and the event program. The annual 10th Festival will take place on May 20-24, 2020.

The Organizing Committee invites publishers, illustrators and different cultural institutions to apply for participation with their own expositional stands. The fair offers the most attractive and comfortable venue in Kyiv, reasonable prices, logical exposition design and easy navigation, optimal conditions for book selling and promotion.

Traditionally the Book Arsenal Festival has effective promotional campaign and diversified event program which annually gathers more than 55 000 visitors. A significant visual component of the Festival along with the space of Old Arsenal create unique, pleasant and comfortable atmosphere for book shopping.

The Book Arsenal team invites to join the Festival emphasizing that it is a great opportunity to increase the number of readers, present new books, draw attention to previous editions and meet the professional community.

Please be aware that this year the terms of participation in the Festival were significantly changed and modified by the Organizing Committee.

‘The main innovation of this year is the introduction of electronic document flow. It means that the Festival participants will register through our website and sign participation agreements with digital signature. This innovation is another step towards eco-orientation which the Mystetskyi Arsenal actively implements in all its projects by spreading the ideas of caring for resources and responsible consumption. The electronic submission of applications will minimize paper usage, speed up the process and, hopefully, will be comfortable for our participants’ – Vira Kruzhylina, the technical director of the Festival.

Applications for participation in the exhibition fair are accepted till January 31, 2020 in accordance with Section 2 of the relevant Regulation. For more information, please visit the page ‘For the exhibition fair participants’ on the Mystetskyi Arsenal website.

It is worth noting that approval of applicants for participating in the exhibition fair is based on the mechanism of expert selection aimed to efficiently use Mystetskyi Arsenal’s limited space for presenting at the Festival a wide variety of publishers whose work is recognized as high quality. The Selection Committee which was created this year will work on this while respecting its curatorial framework. At the same time the Festival supports new independent actors promoting quality competition on the market.

The Organizing Committee will notify the applicants on the selection results in late February by email.

The program part is a significant component of the Book Arsenal which annually includes about 500 events. To ensure the quality and relevance of the events, the curatorial team works on the festival program which also processes submitted applications with ideas of events and special projects. Some of them can be selected for implementation within one of the curatorial programs.

‘We invite applicants to participate in the Book Arsenal to choose for themselves the optimal variant of presentation, considering their own resources, scale of activity, purpose of participation. In particular, we are introducing a non-stand participation format for those who choose not to be present at the fair with their own stand, but to have a manifestation in the Festival program. This format gives an opportunity to present the individual editions, book-related projects, cultural initiatives, live meetings with audience on the Book Arsenal’s stages. It is important for the curatorial team to create a meaningful and diverse program of events, where current meanings and contexts could be discussed and experiments with formats and concepts could take place. We are looking for new ideas, new names, new focuses and topics in the received applications’ – Yuliia Kozlovets, the Festival coordinator.

Ideas for the possible events can be sent by February 3, 2020, and the selection results are to be announced in early March. The team will review them and try to fit into the overall concept in case of finding common points and topics. For more information, please visit the page ‘For the program participants’ on the Mystetskyi Arsenal website.