A calendar reflecting the ideas of people with Down syndrome about eroticism

Participants of the Atelienormalno art workshop, which employs people with Down syndrome, have created a calendar for 2023-2024. The co-founder of the workshop, Kateryna Libkind, announced this on her Facebook page.

“We started working on an erotic calendar back in 2021, but something kept preventing it from happening. Now it has appeared, it is here with us, warm, gentle, fitting easily in your hand. In addition to its stunning beauty and mobility, the calendar is longer than usual. It starts in March 2023 and lasts until May 2024,” she said.

The calendar consists of a set of postcards with reproductions of works about the body created by the authors of the Atelienormalno workshop: Valentyn Radchenko, Ania Sapon, Oleksandr Steshenko, Zhenya Golubentsev, and Anna Litvinova. The set also includes 2 pages with erotic stickers. Assistants Ryba Verner, Katya Libkind, Valeria Tarasenko, Timur Tkachenko, Stanislav Turina and Tasia Shpil also took part in the creation of the calendar.

The key words in the calendar are “art brut”, “eroticism”, “sexuality”, and “perception of the world”.

According to Libkind, Atelienormalno thought about whether it would be appropriate to produce such a calendar now, but decided to release it because “eroticism, love and the body are even more powerful to us now than they were before.”

The calendar was published with the support of the Jewish-Ukrainian Social Initiative and the ua.outsider.art community.

“All the funds raised will be used to organize and support artistic activities of people with mental disabilities, provide inclusive opportunities for creative self-realization, raise public awareness of the art of “outsiders”, and implement volunteer initiatives that allow people with disabilities to join in supporting our defenders,” said Volodymyr Vysotskyi, director of the Jewish-Ukrainian Social Initiative.

Atelienormalno is an art studio for artists with and without Down syndrome, founded in 2018 in Kyiv as a result of workshops initiated by the Goethe Institute in Ukraine in partnership with the German research center Touchdown21.

You can order the calendar here.

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Image: Facebook page of Atelienormalno