Group exhibition: 

Dialog between Generations. Belarusian Female Artists

Curated by Maya Hristova and Jewgeni Roppel / EEP Berlin
Participants: Oksana Veniaminova, Tatsiana Tkachova, Vasilisa Palianina, Kate Smuraga and Lesia Pcholka, VEHA archive  

Gallery :

KVOST. Berlin, DE

A variety of approaches to contemporary photographic thinking and research blend seamlessly with classical portraiture inviting the viewer to peek behind the Western veil of silence about Belarusian visual culture and photographic tradition. For many of us, Minsk which is only about 1000km away from Berlin, as is Paris, could have been on another continent.

What causes us to think of one culture as familiar and another as exotic? Be passionate about one and put another one in a box? Looking and knowing beyond the stereotypical image of Belarus, or what mass media are presenting merely as yet another failing state on the map, or Europe’s last dictatorship, feels even more pressing now that we know what the actual situation in Belarus is: mass protests and political prisoners in the hundreds, silencing of the media, beatings, kidnappings and torture of civilians.

And while all this is happening, we again seek solace in art. It is this new generation of Belarusian artists who have gained the power to encapsulate and translate the ambivalence of historical silence into tangible works of art. For many of them, reflecting upon the past often means reimagining and rebuilding the broken dialogue with their own history. It is remembrance work out of an utmost necessity. And it seems that recuperating and examining the missing parts of collective memory oftentimes exposes the deliberate censorship of the present. Indeed, it is in the uncertainties of interpretation and the disjuncture between past and future that hope for transformation exists.

Additionally, the processing of history through the Belarusian artist’s subjective standpoint proves invaluable. Because currently  in Belarus the personal is political to a much higher degree than elsewhere in Europe.

Historical traumas, past and present ongoing political conflict and subsequent journeys of displacement are if not directly depicted, then continuously reflected upon. Intimate connections between private and political become starting points for dealing with memory.

KVOST and EEP, two Berlin-based organizations fostering the arts in the Eastern European context, present this exhibition which houses curators Maya Hristova and Jewgeni Roppel’s research into Belarusian visual codes of remembering and structuring knowledge. Unfolding in the form of generational dialogues through the photographic medium, the presented research will hopefully result in a deeper understanding of the multidimensionality of the contemporary Belarusian photographic context through the vision of some of its main actors. And female artists who in their work manage to transcend their personal experience of living through a decisive moment of their country’s history.