Contemporary artists are attracted to books as a medium with which they can present a self-contained message, where the uniqueness of the maker and the object they created is in the spotlight. Alexander Vasilyevich Ahanov is one of those artists for whom books have always been of great importance. This influenced him creatively and resulted in him taking on a long-term project that centered around words.

During the 1990s and 2000s he spent several years actively working on his “Graphomania” series. In Greek “grapho” means “to write”, and “mania” means “passion”. One can interpret the meaning of this series as painful passion for writing. At the same time, Alexander Ahanov argued that graphomania is not unique to writing — for artists this word means a passion for visual creativity.

Ahanov once said:

Art objects such as this exhibit represent the artist’s original ideas regarding books. In Ahanov’s work, books are used as metaphors and become encrypted messages with various associations.

In the “Book of Vanity and Superstition”, the author reflects on human nature, which is characterized by restlessness, jumping back and forth between beliefs, which sometimes oppose each other. This art object is a book with a lot of stickers, tabs made of various materials and small objects.

The artist used a zipper, keys from an old typewriter, springs, scraps of leather and canvas with signs and inscriptions painted on them in black paint, a long screw with a spring, fragments of metal plates with holes of different shapes and other objects.