About: — Sergey Shabohin

2021, Berlin

Sergey Shabohin is an artist, independent curator, author of texts about art, archivist and researcher of Belarusian culture. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Kalektar research platform for contemporary Belarusian art, a member of the working group of the OpenMuzej initiative, and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Art Aktivist portal about activism and contemporary Belarusian art.

He owns the Gray Mandorla Studio space in Poznan. He has curated and co-curated several exhibitions, programs, and competitions. He is a Belarusian art activist, author of lectures, creator of numerous cultural initiatives, co-founder of cultprotest.me, and initiator of the program aimed at creating a Museum of Contemporary Art in Belarus. The artist is also involved in interdisciplinary practices: directing films and performances, collaborating with musicians and theatergoers.

Born in Navapolack (Belarus). Lives and works in Poznan and Berlin.

Sergey Shabohin regularly resorts to the method of archiving, accumulating digital and analog archival collections – sometimes total collections of objects and images. To prepare his works he often constructs glossaries, uses "A4" quasi-office aesthetics, and develops the concept of forming author's traveling museums. In order to establish a research archive (and museum in the future), Sergey Shabohin created the Kalektar platform, which collects, analyzes and publishes the history of Belarusian contemporary art as a digital encyclopedia.

Sergey Shabohin is a queer artist, often referring in his works to the anti-patriarchal fem- and queer-optics, the codes of the LGBTQ+ community and the aspect of sexuality. Corporeality, biopolitics, and the category of the "social body" are frequent topics reflected in his works. His artistic language is particularly sensitive to the injustices and problems of invisible and disadvantaged communities, as well as to the theme of displaced and invisible history/memories, which he tries to identify and bring back into the public context.

The artist resorts to interdisciplinary practices: in addition to visual art, he regularly works with the spheres of theater, film and music, and actively interacts with representatives of both the art system and civic activists, philosophers and writers. He uses a wide multimedia toolkit: graphic, pictorial, sculptural and photographic practices, works with found objects and images, creates videos and installations, and works with text and narrativity.

In the 2010s, on the wave of civil society activity, he manifested the need to switch from partisan strategies in Belarusian art to art activism, for which he launched the Art Aktivist portal, which during three years raised the most topical issues and contributed to the politicization of Belarusian art. During this period, the artist completely rejected graphic and pictorial practices, using deliberately poor anti-esthetics and activist strategies, proclaiming his own slogans, criticizing the art system, actively giving lectures on contemporary art (also illegally at the Belarusian Academy of Art). Sergey Shabohin is ranked among the leaders of the generation of young Belarusian artists of the first half of the 2010s for his work and activism.

In 2015, he became one of the founders of the contemporary art research platform KALEKTAR, which today represents a large digital archive of Belarusian art in the form of an encyclopedia and online magazine. In 2016, the artist emigrated from Belarus, and since then has lived and worked in Bialystok, Warsaw, Poznan and Berlin. During this time, he has reflected on migration, borders, and bureaucracy in adapting to the new political conditions and actively integrating into the environment, interacting with local colleagues. In 2021, he opened Gray Mandorla Studio in Poznan. In 2020, on the wave of protest movement in Belarus, together with Maksim Tyminko, he developed a resource with protest posters cultprotest.me, which also became a space for anti-war posters during the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. Since 2023, he has been a member of the working group for the project to create a nomadic museum of Belarusian contemporary art, OpenMuzej.

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