Since 2014
ID: C12
Cycle:
Social Marble
The cycle is based on an observation of the practices of public cleaning services in Minsk, who are unable to wash away the corrosive graffiti from the Soviet marble and granite walls of underpasses and began to glue them with a self-adhesive film with a marble pattern. The artist called such quasi-marble "social marble” which anyone can afford. As part of the cycle, on the one hand, the artist uses this film to create works about communities and the rise of civil society in Belarus, about social transformation and the network of solidarity. On the other hand, this film symbolizes the Belarusian authoritarian regime, its censorship and the image of the pseudo-social state, which is based on the Soviet myth. This part of the cycle criticizes the historical fakes and nation-building mythology of the Belarusian state. Also, Social Marble reveals the image of memory palimpsests and the anxiety of traumatic historical transformations in the Eastern European region.
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Since 2011
ID: C4
Cycle:
Practices of
Subordination
A total research archive of objects of fear found in Belarus from 2010 till 2018. This traveling mobile collection-museum consists of more than a thousand found and created objects, documents, images, slogans, video and audio files. All exhibits in the archive are fundamentally mundane ordinary objects that are evidence against the state (exemplified by the Belarusian regime), and demonstrate the deleterious effects on its citizens (exemplified by Belarusian society) throughout life, beginning long before birth and ending with the regulation of a person's memory after his or her death. The cycle intertwines political science and art history, urban studies and sociology, mythology and biology. This cycle sequentially "dissects the body" of the Leviathan State into 18 carefully crafted artistic parts. Each part explores the mechanisms of emergence, rise, triumph, functioning and decline of the state ideology and practices of subordination.
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Since 2010
ID: C3
Cycle:
ST()RE
A research cycle that tells the story of the hidden aspects of history in the context of public space. Working with hidden history and displaced memory, for which historically-saturated public places in different locations around the world are chosen. For each work of the cycle the image of a storefront (English store is similar in sound to history) is created, in or around which the fragments of the work are placed. Various strategies are used to create showcases in the cycle: showcases/ ballot boxes; a showcase/greenhouse that defends environmental protest; a showcase/spontaneous monument about state sacralization of censorship; a showcase/parasite that returns the historical layer to a decorative monument; a fair showcase that criticizes the commercialization of history; a showcase/laboratory that ironizes the phallogocentrism of science, and so on. The images of transparency, glass/screen and showcase/window appear more than once in the cycle: the window-laboratory on a university campus in Stockholm, the window-scare reminding about victims, the screen for the blind, the "blind window" as a symbol of hidden history, etc. Also, as part of the cycle interventions in museums are created, where their own museum equipment is exhibited, decommissioned after prolonged use. The project is implemented in different cities, so far these are: Bialystok, Bishkek, Vilnius, Homiel, Dnepr, Krakow, Minsk, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Tbilisi, Warsaw. The cycle is part of the project ST()RE where the image of a showcase becomes a transparent ballot box.
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Since 2020
ID: C9
Cycle:
Atlas of Tectonic Landscapes
A cycle about large-scale geopolitical upheavals: military conflicts, pandemics, protest waves, remaking of the world order, cultural revolutions – by way of example of the turbulent times in the Eastern European region. The project incorporates found images and methodological approaches from other cycles such as Social Marble, We Are Stern Consumers of Cultural Revolutions, and Border-Gap, which also examine the context of historical and cultural layering and the topic of faults and borders. This cycle presents mental landscapes in the context of current news nervous storylines. Different imagery collides in the works – geometric plates are layered on different backgrounds depicting landscapes and spaces. Taking the ideas of avant-garde art of the 1920s as a basis, the artist has transferred abstract forms into the context of the realistic, the twilight, the romantic and the expressionistic, creating an atlas of images of colossal transformations in culture, politics and, more broadly, human consciousness.
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Since 2018
ID: C11
Cycle:
Border-Gap
A cycle of works about migration and borders, smuggling and breaking down barriers. The cycle began to develop as a reflection on the bureaucratic mechanisms accompanying the artist's immigration process. The cycle also includes various works about borders: the crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border, military collapse, meat smuggling, and attempts to illegally breach borders. Discussions about the geopolitical crisis in the region made into a separate cycle: Plate Tectonics.
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