Exhibition :

LET IT SHINE. Beyond VEHA Photographic Archive

Curator : Vera Zalutskaya
Artists : Kate Ngan Wa Ao, Rozalina Busel, Olga Anna Markowska, Lesia Pcholka,
Katarzyna Sienkiewicz

02.06 – 10.09.2023

Gallery : MOS. Municipal Art Center. Gorzów Wielkopolski, PL

The central point of the exhibition is the VEHA archive, founded in 2017 by Lesia Pcholka and remaining one of the most important initiatives for the preservation of the Belarusian visual heritage. The project involves the collection and cataloguing of amateur and family photographs, documenting various aspects of social life since the advent of this medium in contemporary Belarus. The themes of the collection so far have included family shots in front of home-woven carpets, wedding and funeral compositions, and images of people against a forest backdrop. A separate book with photographs and research texts has been produced for each theme. By collecting, researching and disseminating a visual social archive, VEHA aims to preserve the traces of the history of everyday life in Belarus. Given that the Belarusian state and public institutions often erase or even destroy remains of local culture, either deliberately or due to a lack of resources, the VEHA project can be seen as a manifestation of both cultural and civic activism.

Artists from Belarus, Poland and Macau were invited to participate in the exhibition. Most of the presented works were created specifically for the show. Olga Anna Markowska, who comes from the Podlasie region, focuses on the relationship between the human and the forest, including by transforming Belarusian folk songs dedicated to nature into contemporary musical compositions. Katarzyna Sienkiewicz, being part of the Belarusian minority in Poland, reveals her own family history, which is linked to weaving (both of her grandmothers were weavers) and Belarusian culture. Originally from Macau, Kate Ngan Wa Ao refers to a specific way of looking at history that is emblematic of areas that lie ‘in-between’ different, often violent, powers and cultures (a feature shared by Belarus and Macau). Rozalina Busel is the author of a poetic installation that combines key attributes of human life and death and visualises the connection between selected themes of the VEHA archive. Lesia Pcholka, the originator and founder of the initiative, has created several works linking the themes of all the archive’s sections. They refer to the complex, often contradictory elements characteristic of Belarusian culture, which cannot be reduced to a monolithic set of national signs and symbols.

The title of the exhibition "Let it Shine" is taken from a fragment of the poem ‘To Live’ by Larysa Heniyush (1910–1983), a Belarusian poet and émigré politician who lived in the time featured in most of the photographs from the VEHA archive. Her understanding of life centres around the simplest of issues: attachment to Mother Earth, forests and gardens; intergenerational bonds, memory, home, and hopes for the best. These are themes that are often found in private family collections containing individual histories. They form a national history when gathered into a larger collection, such as the VEHA archive. This history is presented in its grassroots form, devoid of grand narratives, well-known names and widely celebrated dates. This allows for a detailed grasp of the manifestations of the local natural and cultural environment through the presentation of the most universal elements of human life.

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