Concrete and Sex

Concrete and Sex pairs nude snapshots with the post-industrial, post-Soviet architecture of Kyiv, Sasha Kurmaz's third publication and a clear statement of the juxtaposition that runs through his early work.

Printed as a 32-page stapled booklet in an edition of 500, the book sets youthful nude bodies against concrete surfaces, political icons and flags. Kurmaz calls his earliest self-published works "funzines," and Concrete and Sex carries that directness: it moves between raw eroticism and a more pointed commentary on ideology stamped onto the built environment.

Kurmaz (born 1986, Kyiv) works across photography, collage, video and public intervention, and has continued to build conceptual artists' books from found and archival material alongside his own images. Concrete and Sex, published by Pogobooks in Berlin in 2013, belongs to the run of small, quickly produced zines through which he first circulated his photography before moving into gallery and institutional contexts.