ALINA AND JEFF BLIUMIS
FROM SELFIE TO GROUPIE
Authors: Joshua Ellison (editor), David Shneer, Anya Ulinich, Jenya Gorbatsevich and Konrad Bercovici
Release Date: May 2015
Format: 9 x 11 inches
Features: 240 pages, 245 full color and 14 black-and-white photographs, hardcover
ISBN 978-0-9797248-2-4
www.selfietogroupie.com
From Selfie to Groupie by Alina and Jeff Bliumis is a book of photographs and essays that explores the variety and intricacy of Jewish-American identity, beginning with the Russian-Jewish immigrant enclave of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach and continuing with the Jewish-American community at large in locations from New York to Philadelphia, Miami, Sonoma Valley, and St.Paul.
In total, 1922 participants have helped make this a vital portrait of the community today “in its many shades, shapes, and sizes” and a collaborative statement about collective identity. Participants ranged from a two-years old girl who identified herself as a "future president" to the vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, who identified himself as "a proud and grateful Jewish American." By creating these social portraits, the project documents a quickly shifting experience, from the past to the present and into the future. The publication has been made possible with the generous support of Genesis Philanthropy Group.
ALINA AND JEFF BLIUMIS
CULTURAL TIPS FOR NEW AMERICANS
Artist Book
Release Date: May 2011
Format: 8 x 6 inches
Features: 20 pages, 16 full color illustrations, softcover
ISBN 978-0-9797248-1-7
To be a foreigner — one who is defined as not from here — often means unknowingly breaking rigid social and cultural rules. Definitions of these social and cultural standards often say a lot about the native society. We gathered advice to help recent arrivals assimilate and understand their new home. We took advice from published guides, public forums, streets questionnaires, social websites, and friends to create tips like:
"When two Americans are standing and talking to each other they stay at least 16 inches away from each other." Life in the USA, The Complete Guide for Immigrants and Americans by Elliot Essman
and
"Never refuse gum if an American offers it to use. Offering gum is a polite way to tell someone that they have bad breath." Jenny W. on Facebook
We have illustrated these tips and produced Cultural Tips For New Americans book. The book is a part of Cultural Tips For New Americans, public art project, New York 2011.
ALINA AND JEFF BLIUMIS
DAM LINES
Introduction by Elizabeth M. Grady
Release Date: May 2008
Format: 7 x 7 inches
Features: 56 pages, 23 full color photographs, softcover
Published by Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York
"Alina and Jeff Bliumis have installed the barricades around their studio near Andes, NY, a small town in the Catskills. Here, language is tied directly to the land in a way that suggests the connection between a territory and the tongue spoken there - a joint notion of a geographic location and the cultural identity of those who inhabit it: in short, nationhood...
The walls built by Alina and Jeff form a nearly continuous line as they wind through the landscape. Even when they appear to break, as in the image of the wall straddling the road, they are actually continued a short distance away as they join an old stone farm wall or extend up a path cut through a grassy field. They often join with existing physical features or transform into new versions of them, as seen in the photograph of the books tucked under the tree limb that seem to join the distant hill to form a shallow valley, or in the case where books are heaped at left and form a cleft together with the mountain descending to meet it at right. Alina and Jeff thus define their own territory, carving out their parcel of reality, and linking themselves to land they have chosen, rather than a land into which they were merely born by chance. They may speak English, Russian, or a language of their own devise in this newly demarcated land, where the language barriers could be seen as a protective cordon rather than an unbreathable wall." Excerpt from Itinerant Borders by Elizabeth M. Grady.
ALINA AND JEFF BLIUMIS
RECEIVING THE STRANGER
Authors: Adam Kleinman, Aniko Erdosi, Nicola Lees and Georgina Jackson, Roberto Pinto, Gerald Janecek, Sylvia Grace Borda and Elisa Tjin, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Vitaly Patsyukov, and Yulia Tikhonova
Release Date: 2007
Format: 10 x 8 inches
Features: 112 pages, 61 full color photographs, softcover
ISBN 978-0-9797248-0-0
Published by CheckOffArtPress, New York
"Often to be a foreigner means that one doesn't understand very much, yet there is also a naivety and a kind of freshness inherent in this strangeness. When approached openly, this lack of understanding can foster an eagerness to communicate. In the work of Jeff and Alina Bliumis, this desire to share goes well beyond a simple hunger for acceptance. As visitors in new lands, they propose gestures that people intimately associated within a given culture would never consider. In this way, they have found a way to exploit "foreignness" as a generative and constructive principle." Excerpt from Introduction / Receiving the Stranger by Adam Kleinman