W46.1

︎ technical info
Murals
For solo exhibition Sergey Shabohin: Divided Solidarity, during the festival Artes Liberales 2017, Ў Gallery, Minsk, Belarus

The wall painting created in the non-profit gallery of modern art "Ў" (Minsk, Belarus) in 2017 consists of three parts. The first part depicts a building in the 70s in Minsk. The building is decorated with one of the most iconic works of monumental art in Minsk of the Soviet era – a bas-relief of Solidarity. This is the former Fashion House, where KFC fast food restaurant is located today. We see people leaving the restaurant and the line continues in the second part, where the crowd, one by one, crawls under the Lenin monument. This monument stands at the Government House in Minsk and and approaching it, as well as photographing the monument from behind is strictly prohibited by the state. The crowd moves on to the building, which is a synthesis of Lenin's mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow and the work of Marcel Duchamp's The Fountain. Thus, it is an image of the synthesis of the two revolutions of 1917: in society and in art. The queue of people has accumulated in front of the urinal, because there you can only enter individually. The entire painting comments on the complex processes taking place in Belarus a century after the revolution: consumerism and consumerism, punitive control and sacralization of communism, divided solidarity and extreme individualism.

Murals
Divided Solidarity,
Ў Gallery, Minsk, Belarus,
2017