Ira Goryacheva — Visual Anarchy
artist
Ira Goryacheva
Studio Baklazanas borrows its guiding line from the psychologist Paul Watzlawick: you cannot not communicate. Its own shorter version is blunter — “We love making posters.” Ira Goryacheva runs this self-described nomadic design studio out of Vilnius, Lithuania, working with museums, theatres, festivals, publishers and universities on identity, posters, editorial, motion and, occasionally, silk scarves. Active since at least 2011, the studio carries an award shelf that would suit an outfit ten times its size: a Red Dot “Best of the Best” in 2013 among several further Red Dot Design Awards, two iF Design Awards in 2022, a German Brand Award in 2019, a Silver European Design Award, and further recognitions from the Type Directors Club and Graphis.
That craft keeps finding civic work to do. “Keep My Words Forever” and a “Save Shukhov Tower!” poster campaign were both prize-winning social-responsibility projects, covered by architecture and design press; a map made with an architecture-preservation research group plotted more than 180 endangered Constructivist buildings, pushing poster-style information design into heritage advocacy. The same instinct travels onto silk: “The Great Utopia”, marking Shukhov Tower’s 95th anniversary, and the limited-edition “Maneki Blues”, auctioned at Dutch Design Week in 2015, sit alongside a “ME-SHU” scarf series and a commission for the Higher School of Economics.
For the Bankov Poster School’s fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square in June 2025, she contributed a poster known internally as “Mess is more”, shown in our programme as “Visual Anarchy” — either title fits a cultural-institution designer letting the grid go.
Why we like it: it looks like a festival programme that escaped.
