Tara: Then and Now, Here and There
Archives and Practices of the Experimental Design Bureau in Vilnius 1960s–1980s
Editors: Karolina Jakaitė, Deimantė Jasiulevičiūtė
Published by: Spector Books, 2025
The Tara bureau was established in 1964 in Vilnius and was most active until the restoration of Independence of Lithuania in 1990. During the Soviet occupation, the bureau was tasked with carrying out various propaganda duties. As a result, when Lithuania regained independence and privatization began, the bureau’s archives were considered too Soviet and were not preserved. This loss has made it particularly difficult to research the Tara bureau and the graphic design of the period.
The Bureau's activities took place during the Cold War, a time when the Iron Curtain prevented people in the Eastern Bloc from traveling freely to the West. However, the Bureau held a unique status tied to Soviet efforts to compete with the West in various fields. As a result, some of the packaging and promotional materials created by the bureau's artists were showcased at Soviet "export" exhibitions in both Eastern Bloc and Western countries. In the West, these products often went unnoticed due to the propaganda embedded in their content, which did not resonate with Western audiences.
The present-day research was based on artistic research methods and interviews, in collaboration with the designers of the Tara bureau themselves. An empathetic and personalized approach made it possible to view the artefacts of the occupation period from a different angle, to extract the lost names of creators and disentangle the chronicles of their complex biographies from the rigid fear, the lies, and the vows of silence.
The loss of the bureau's archives is another challenge which has caused many events, names, and works to fade into oblivion. Most of the visual examples in this book are sourced from private collections. Today, the rediscovered artefacts of the Tara archive speak not only of the processes of Lithuania’s intermittent graphic design history, but also of the signs of time, the sensitive narratives and the stories of identity recorded in those otherwise insignificant objects.
Throughout the book, Glossary keywords (e. g., [A]rtist-constructors, [B]altic, [C]ensorship, [D]esign etc.) are inserted with markings reminiscent of scanned packaging, enabling navigation between Then and Now, Here and There. This approach provides a contextual introduction to the period of the Tara bureau as well as the intentions and practices of its artists. When creating the Glossary, we searched for reflections of identity, signs of time, and other codes of meaning. The attempts to explore these surviving examples from a contemporary perspective, involve recreating small segments at a time, investigating the biographies of individual artists or fragments of individual works by using the essential zoom-in method which is discussed in our conversation. The fragmentary nature of the Tara bureau’s archive, reflected by the incompleteness of the Glossary, is encoded in its very identity.
Texts: Karolina Jakaitė
Reviewed by:
Prof. dr. Lolita Jablonskienė (Vilnius Academy of Arts)
Prof. dr. (hp) Giedrė Jankevičiūtė (Lithuanian Institute for Culture Research)
Additional essay:
Paul Gangloff
Graphic design:
Zuzana Kostelanská with Oriol Cabarrocas
Editorial design:
Deimantė Jasiulevičiūtė
Translations from Lithuanian:
Laima Bezginaitė
English language editing:
Tania Theodorou
Proofreading:
Laima Bezginaitė, Anne König
Image correction: ScanColor Reprostudio GmbH Leipzig
Printing and binding: Druckhaus Sportflieger Berlin
Financed by:
Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie
Lithuanian Council for Culture
„Grafobal Vilnius" Lithuanian and Slovak Public LLC
Translation was financed by:
Lithuanian Culture Institute
Institutional partners:
Design Foundation (www.dizainofondas.lt)
Vilnius Academy of Arts
SODAS 2123
LAPAS Publishing House
Published by:
Spector Books
Harkortstraße 10
04107 Leipzig
Distribution:
Germany, Austria: GVA, Gemeinsame Verlagsauslieferung Göttingen GmbH&Co. KG,
www.gva-verlage.de
Switzerland: AVA Verlagsauslieferung AG, www.ava.ch
France, Belgium: Interart Paris, www.interart.fr
UK: Central Books Ltd, www.centralbooks.com
USA, Canada, Central and South America, Africa: ARTBOOK/ D.A.P., www.artbook.com
Japan: twelvebooks, www.twelve-books.com
South Korea: The Book Society, www.thebooksociety.org
Australia, New Zealand: Perimeter Distribution, www.perimeterdistribution.com
Baltic distribution: Lithuanian publisher LAPAS (www.leidyklalapas.lt)
