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 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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Since 2014
ID: C13
Cycle:
Zones of
Repression
Or Displacement Zones
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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