Upcoming and current events

Tour group exhibition
When the Sun Is Low – the Shadows Are Long

April 1 – May 13, 2022
Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok

June 10 – September 25, 2022
GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Leipzig

Curator Anna Karpenko

Curatorial project
Gray Mandorla Manifest
December 18, 2021 – April 18, 2022

Gray Mandorla Studio, Poznań

Curator Sergey Shabohin

Latest news

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Special project
Sergey Shabohin & Christoph Ogierman / Practices of Subordination cycle: Score

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Curatorial project

Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance

March 25 — May 04, 2021

Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv

Curators Aleksei Borisionok, Andrei Dureika, Marina Naprushkina, Sergey Shabohin, Antonina Stebur, Maxim Tyminko

Curatorial project

Fear

July 21 — October 18, 2020

Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok

Curators Nikita Kadan, Sergey Shabohin, Monika Szewczyk, Eliza Urwanowicz-Rojecka, Natalia Vatsadze

All news

Recent exhibitions

Group exhibition
When Red and White ain’t so Black and White

February 5 — March 19, 2022

Sentiment, Zurich

Curator Slavs and Tatars’ Pickle Bar

Festival
ECLAT Festival. Konzert 13: Practises of Subordination

February 5, 2022

Theaterhaus Stuttgart, Stuttgart

Group exhibition ODKSZTAŁCENIE / ДЭФАРМАЦЫЯ / UNLEARNING

October 7 — November 3, 2021

Domie, Poznan

Curators Aleksei Borisionok, Raman Tratsiuk, Vera Zalutskaya

In duet

Nikolay Karabinovych
and Sergey Shabohin:
All Against You

September 25 — October 5, 2021

Dzherelo pavilion, Kyiv

Curator Raw Burrow curatorial group (Nikita Kadan, Alina Kleytman, Dana Kosmina)

Group exhibition
Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2021

Identity inscriptions. Membership. Difference. Gesture

Semptember 30 — November 30, 2021

Biuro Wystaw, Warsaw

Curators Sarmen Beglarian and Andrzej Wajs

Public art festival
XIII public art festival
Otwarte Miasto /
Open City. War Art

Semptember 17 — October 15, 2021

Open City, Lublin

Curator Andrei Dureika

Group exhibition
Berlin Art Week Every Night

September 16 — 19, 2021

Haus der Statistik, Berlin

Solo exhibition
Social Marble:
Nationalization of Freedom

June 25 — July 25, 2021

Rosa Stern Space, Munich

Curator Lena Prents

Triennal
Baltic Triennial 14:
The Endless Frontier
June 4 — September 5, 2021

Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

Curators Valentinas Klimašauskas and João Laia

Festival
Tectonic Shift

May 21 — 23, 2021

Monsters’ Castle, Odessa

Curator Kateryna Radchenko

Queer festival
Session of Tenderness

March 11 — June 01, 2021

Online

Curators: Q rators

Curatorial project
Marek Wodzisławski:
POV

February 25 — April 4, 2021

Ujazdowski Castl Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw

Curator Sergey Shabohin

Protest exhibition
Belarus Protest Art

December 15 — 27, 2020

59 Rivoli, Paris

Curators Kirill Pissarev, Lena Zerka

Solo project
Social Marble:
the Rise of Civil
Society in Belarus

November 1 — 20, 2020

House der Statistic, Berlin

Group exhibition
Touchable Distance

October 29 — November 29, 2020

Ў Gallery of contemporary art, Minsk

Curator Anastasiya Grishanova, Valentina Kiselyova, Anna Chistoserdova

Solo project
Social Marble:
Scenery

February 25 — April 4, 2021

Ujazdowski Castl Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw

Curator Sergey Shabohin

Group exhibition
Faceless

September 18 — Oktober 3, 2020

KH space, Brest

Curator Lizaveta Mikhalchuk

Curatorial project
B.A.R.
(Belarus. Art. Revolution)

Sentember 25 — October 15, 2020

Kulturfabrik Moabit, Berlin

Curator Sergey Shabohin

Group exhibition
We Are People

June 24 — October 11, 2020

Galeria Labirynt, Lublin

Curator Waldemar Tatarczuk

Group exhibition
All of Poland.
The Journey to the Source of Art.
Vol. 2

June 5 — August 22, 2020

Gdańska Galeria Miejska, Gdansk

Curator Anna Mituś

Group online exhibition
Solidarity and Agency

June 1 — December 31, 2020

Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok

Curators Katarzyna Różniak, Eliza Urwanowicz-Rojecka

Group exhibition
From the Peripheral

January 24 — March 29, 2020

Galeria Kameralna / Centrum Aktywności Twórczej / Baszta Czarownic, Slupsk and Ustka, Poland

Curators Edyta Wolska, Roman Lewandowski

Group exhibition
Whole Poland. The Expedition to the Sources of Art

December 13, 2019 — February 2, 2020

BWA Wrocław Gallery Contemporary Art, Wroclaw

Curator Anna Mituś

Solo exhibition / congress
Congress-Performance
of Cultural Workers

November 23, 2019

Lo-Fi Social Club, Minsk

Group exhibition
New Works
in the Arsenal Gallery
Collection II
(Kolekcja II)

November 14 — 17, 2019

Arsenal Gallery Power station, Bialystok

Curator Monika Szewczyk

Group exhibition
The City of Tomorrow

September 30 — October 25, 2019

Art Belarus Gallery, ZAL #2, Minsk

Curators Ruben Arevshatyan, Anna Kats, Georg Schöllhammer

Group exhibition
Today We Will
Invent the Nations

October 5 — 25, 2019

Kmytiv Museum of Soviet Art, Kmytiv

Curator Nikita Kadan

Group exhibition / residence
Forum Regionum

September 11 — 22, 2019

Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, Dnepr

Solo exhibition / discussion
Social Marble in the Center of Europe

27 June – 31 July, 2019

August 8 – September 15, 2019

CLB Berlin, Berlin

Group exhibition / residence
Love Hope Faith.
In Honour of

September 11 — 22, 2019

Exhibition Bureau / Polish Modern Art Foundation, Warsaw

Curators: Sarmen Beglarian, Sylwia Szymaniak

All exhibitions

About

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

Owner of Gray Mandorla Studio space in Poznan. Curator and co-curator of several exhibitions, programs, and competitions, Belarusian art activist, author of lectures, creator of dozens of cultural initiatives, co-founder of cultprotest.me, initiator of the program aimed at creating a Museum of Contemporary Art in Belarus.

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

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Cycles

Artist works within long cycles. At the moment he is developing 13 cycles of works:

Since 2014

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 2020

Plate Tectonics

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 2011

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

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 2012

We are Stern Consumers of Cultural Revolutions

The cycle observes the attitude towards the heritage of the historical avant-garde in Viciebsk. In the early 1920s, the art school UNOVIS was located in Viciebsk. The artist points to the fact that during the Cold War the ideas of the avant-garde were perceived much more positively in Western culture, while in Belarus the suprematism and constructivist ideas of UNOVIS were alienated for many years. The cycle looks at these processes and the attitude to the heritage of the avant-garde in the "West" and "East" by way of example of the reconstruction of the building of the Viciebsk public school and the establishment of a museum of the history of this school, which cannot stand up to criticism. The artist demonstrates how the ideas of avant-garde return to Belarus today in the form of mass-cult and design for the mass consumer and how the ideas of the avant-garde school are integrated into the modernity.

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Since 2018

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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Since 2014

Displacement Zones (Zones of Repression)

The cycle is based on the dating practices of the gay community in men's toilets, using Belarus as an example. In the context of a patriarchal, conservative authoritarian state, all public spaces are literally scrubbed and deviant forms of behavior are alienated from society. Even the inscriptions on the walls of public toilets are quickly erased. That is why men have learned to leave messages for each other on the seams between the tiles – unnoticed by the cleaning services. Since 2006, the artist has had an impressive collection of such hidden inscriptions and drawings of what was depicted in the toilets, and reproduces this collection in the form of installations: fragments of walls or entire rooms are pasted over with ceramic tiles and the entire archive is placed on the seams. This cycle is an image of public space in Belarus: sterilized, aggressive to any different forms of behavior, where everything that does not fit into the norms of the patriarchal and conservative Belarusian state is pushed out into hidden zones: clubs, apartments, toilets, and back alleys. These seams, according to the authorities, are covered with dirt, but they are a symbol of freedom of speech, the social grid, and the framework of a civil society. The cycle is the first part of a queer trilogy, dedicated to contrasting the conservative patriarchal culture of Belarus with the "dirt" of a marginalized queer community.

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Since 2016

Fear of Castration

This is the second part of a queer trilogy confronting conservative patriarchal society in Belarus and Poland with the culture of the queer community. The cycle seeks to critique official Belarusian culture through a paradoxical confrontation with the gay sex subculture. The cycle creates total installations that reveal the fears of the official culture and ideology in relation to the "filth" of LGBT subcultures. The installation is filled with photographs depicting the interiors and details of darkroom spaces found in gay clubs and bars in Warsaw in 2016. In addition to the collected photo archive, the installation includes the slogan "White culture is afraid to look into a black hole." The installation's “black cube” is framed in the "white cube" of the gallery space as a dark room, a labyrinth, or a chamber of horrors. The installation is opposed by the specific aesthetic dialect of "black rooms" against the ruling "white" (here = official Belarusian and Polish) culture, which, according to the artist, should stop being afraid of marginal aesthetics and thus overcome the "fear of castration".

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Since 2020

Mandrake Gardens

This is the third part of a queer trilogy comparing the Belarusian context to LGBTQ+ culture (this time with the Berlin context). The series is based on a two-channel video about two parks: the Hasenheide in Berlin and Peoples’ Friendship Park in Minsk. During the pandemic in the summer of 2020, nightclubs in Berlin were closed and city residents began organizing illegal parties in parks. Particularly conspicuous were the raves of thousands in Hasenheide Park, in its northern part – a popular gathering place for the queer community. In this part, the dense park is an attraction for cruising and queer orgies. At the same time, there was an election campaign in Belarus – only in six locations in Minsk it was allowed to campaign, the most convenient of which was Peoples’ Friendship Park in Minsk. On July 30, 2020, an official picket of Sviatlana Cihanouskaya was held in the park. Tens of thousands of people came to the rally. Two screens show in parallel two seemingly so different contexts: illegal raves and official pickets; the soft reaction of the Berlin police and the aggression of the Minsk power structures; the sexuality of cruising and the energy of protest; white ribbons with a knot in the trees as a symbol of the LGBTQ+ community and white ribbons on arms as a symbol of the protest movement in Minsk; the myth of the mandrake growing from a male seed and the Belarusian mythology with semiotics of potatoes; etc. The double video thus does not so much compare contexts as it demonstrates an unquenchable thirst for life and the struggle for freedom against the backdrop of urban park landscapes.

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Since 2011

Art Aktivism

A cycle of activist, institutional-critical and anti-aesthetic works, actions and installations. Against the background of the rise of civic activism in 2010–2011, Sergey Shabohin created a web-portal Art Aktivist, which aim was to politicize Belarusian art and manifest the need to transition from partisan strategies in the art of Belarus to art activism. During this period the artist abandoned drawing in favor of other media: activist strategies, video, installation, actions and texts. He resorted to the method of so-called anti-aesthetics – the abandonment of the search for his own representationalism in favor of the existing artistic language of leftist political discourse. As part of the cycle, he criticized the art system, proclaimed slogans, gave lectures, and collaborated with civil society.

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Since 2018

Street Without End

The cycle is dedicated to Navapolack, where the artist was born. Navapolack is one of the youngest cities in Belarus, which began to be built in 1958 around the city's oil refinery. The city was a Soviet utopia, which did not materialize, and under the new political and economic conditions, the city began to decline. This is also indicated by the construction of the housing blocks in the form of letters СССР (USSR), but the last house in the form of the letter Р (R) was not completed due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The main work of the cycle is a video based on selected shots of the feature film Street Without End (1972) by Belarusfilm film studio. It was filmed in Navapolack, which was under construction at the time. For the video, the character on the background of urban space and natural landscapes was "cut out", turned into a ghost. This cycle is about Soviet utopia and its unfulfilled aspirations, urbanism and nature, memory and nostalgia.

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2016–2017

PUST*

An interdisciplinary project exploring the processes of mythologizing a specific historical event – the 1991 Belavezha Agreements, when the presidents of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine signed an agreement to dissolve the Soviet Union. The project was created together with Russian colleagues and includes a light installation, dance, sound, multi-channel video, as well as a constructed research archive of objects and images. The project PUST* is an attempt to comprehend through artistic means a specific historical event, its symbols and mythology, a way of filling in the gaps in one's own "mental map".

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Since 2009

Every Day I Talk to the Dead and Alive Artists

An artist's debut cycle based on strategies of appropriation and dialogue with other artists, men and women. Within the framework of the cycle the works are created in one way or another connected to the history of art and reflecting upon the situation in the art system: critique of commercialization of art and consumerism, refusal of authorship and concept of death of an author, institutional critique, self-reflexive conceptual works, self-irony. Most of the works in the cycle refer to the works of other artists, such as Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol, in the context of a critique of the consumerism of culture.

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Latest selected works

2022:

Pictorially collage series Plate Tectonics, 2022

2021

Public art installation Social Marble: Cover, festival Open City, Lublin, 2021

Procedural exhibition-archive Social Marble: the Rise of Civil Society in Belarus, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, 2020–2021

Collages series We are Stern Consumers of Cultural Revolutions: Patches (Social Marble), 2019–2021

Sculpture series Social Marble: Sickles, 2021

2020:

Video Mandrake Gardens, 2020

Graphic panel-archive Practices of Subordination: Score, 2020

Procedural exhibition-archive Social Marble: the Rise of Civil Society in Belarus, House der Statistic, Berlin, 2020

Installation in public space Social Marble: Scenery, square in front of the Teatr Polski, Pоznan, 2020

Photo ST()RE #12: Dusty Slogan, 2020

Neon sign Pyramid of Alienation, 2020

Graphic series Martyrdom, 2020

Collage #evalution, 2020

2019:

Installation Social Marble in the Center of Europe, CLB Berlin, Berlin, 2019

Sergey Shabohin and Paweł Matyszewski: sculpture Smuggling of Biomaterials (Car Door / BMW E6-43R-00048), video installation, 2019

Site-specific installation Zones of Repression, PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, 2019

Mural Friendship Mound (Three Sisters), Polish Modern Art Foundation, Warsaw, 2019

Site-specific installation ST()RE #11: Blind Window, Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, Dnepr, 2019

Sergey Shabohin and Paweł Matyszewski: sculpture Smuggling of Biomaterials (Car Door / Ford 1327 1J00922), 2019

Information wallpapers Kalektar, 2019

Installation Greenhause Conditions, Lo-Fi Social Club, Minsk, 2019

Site-specific installation ST()RE #10: Kadaverruhe, Brehmer's Sanatorium, Sokołowsko, Poland, 2019

Installation Social Marble in the Center of Europe, 2019

Total installation Fear of Castration: Darkroom-Labyrinth, 2019

2018:

Canvases Canvas Cut with the Karta Polaka [1 and 2], 2018

Video installation Street Without End, 2018

All works Works index Cycles

Sergey Shabohin

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Practices of Subordination (Horisont)

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