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Short Bio
Sergey Shabohin is an artist, curator, and researcher working between Poland and Germany. His practice combines art, activism, and archiving, focusing on the intersections of visual culture, memory, and queer and post-migration perspectives.
He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Kalektar, a platform for research and archiving of Belarusian contemporary art, a member of the working group of Open Muzej, and the founder of Art Aktivist. Shabohin is also the founder of Gray Mandorla Studio in Poznań – an independent art space and community hub that hosts exhibitions, residencies, and collaborative programs.
Born in Navapolack (Belarus). Lives and works in Poznań and Berlin.
Long Bio
Sergey Shabohin regularly resorts to the method of archiving, creating digital and analog archival collections – sometimes total assemblages of objects and images. In preparing his works, he often constructs glossaries, employs the “A4 office aesthetics”, and develops the concept of author’s traveling museums. In order to institutionalize a research archive (and a museum in the future), Shabohin founded the platform KALEKTAR, which collects, analyzes, and publishes the history of Belarusian contemporary art in the form of a digital encyclopedia.
Sergey Shabohin is a queer artist, whose works often refer to anti-patriarchal, feminist, and queer optics, the codes of the LGBTQ+ community, and the theme of sexuality. The categories of corporeality, biopolitics, and the “social body” occupy a central place in his artistic practice. His visual language is particularly sensitive to the injustices and issues of invisible and marginalized communities, as well as to displaced or suppressed histories and memories, which he seeks to identify and bring back into the public context.
Shabohin also works as a curator of numerous exhibition projects – from solo shows of fellow artists to large-scale research exhibitions. He employs interdisciplinary practices: in addition to visual art, he works in the fields of theater, film, and music, collaborating with artists, civic activists, philosophers, and writers. His wide multimedia toolkit includes graphic, pictorial, sculptural, and photographic practices, found objects and images, video, installations, text, and narrative forms.
In 2015, he became one of the co-founders of the research platform KALEKTAR, which today functions as the largest digital archive of Belarusian art in the form of an encyclopedia and an online magazine.
Since 2016, the artist has lived in exile, working and residing in Białystok, Warsaw, Poznań, and Berlin. During this period, his works have reflected on migration, borders, bureaucracy, and adaptation to new political realities, while he actively integrated into the local art scenes and collaborated with colleagues from Poland and across Europe. In 2020, amid the Belarusian protest movement, together with Maksim Tyminko, he created the platform cultprotest.me – a digital space for protest posters, which during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 also became a platform for anti-war visual solidarity.
Since 2020, the artist has lived and worked in Poznań, where he founded Gray Mandorla Studio – an independent art space that brings together the Belarusian emigrant queer community. The studio functions as a place for exhibitions, residencies, and collective meetings; it also houses the office of the research platform KALEKTAR and serves as a shared workspace for other artists.
Since 2023, Shabohin has been a member of the working group for the creation of Open Muzej – the Museum of Belarusian Contemporary Art in Exile.
By 2025, an active community had formed around Gray Mandorla Studio, leading to the creation of the media project GM Room, which unites a range of initiatives originating from the studio: a film blog and cinephile club, a website and map of Poznań, a series of events, and research-based projects. Today, Gray Mandorla Studio and GM Room function as an important center of solidarity, self-organization, and horizontal culture for the Belarusian and international emigrant community in Poland.