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In early 2019, as a response to a request made by the Belarusian Union of Designers, the Belarusian Ministry of Culture officially proclaimed ‘exhibition activities’ (or, in other words, exhibition-making) neither an intellectual, nor an artistic practice, provoking public outrage and mockery. Using this episode as a case study, researcher Anton Barysenka reflects upon the current status of an artworker in Belarus, and comments on the structural decay and tensions within current Belarusian culture politics.
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Researcher and curator Tania Arcimovich presents an essay on the social and economic status of Belarusian artists. In the frame of her mini-research, she compares local experiences within the art field with transformations happening in the global sphere of culture.
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Curator and researcher Antonina Stebur reflects on institutional critique in Belarus and studies a case of censorship within the exhibition Nevidivizm by Kirill Diomchev that took place at the Art Museum in Vitebsk.
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Linda Tedsdotter invites artists to take part in her ongoing piece “Apocalypse Insurance”, in which she would present vacuum packaged art books for survivors of the future, when this world finally will go underwater.
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In “The collective writings”, artists Nils Claesson, Olia Sosnovskaya, Nicolay Spesivtsev, Dzina Zhuk discuss the notion of ‘work’ and ‘non-work’ in the context of Contemporary Art and Economics. Questioning the work-centered future, they investigate political potentiality of laziness, procrastination and non-productivity, alternative models of pleasures and affective labor.
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In the frame of the research project Heritagization – a term that refers to the process of manifestation of cultural heritage – researchers Alina Dzeravianka, Chiara Valli, and Elina Vidarsson have collected a number of research cases of grassroot artistic and activist initiatives from Belarus and Sweden, which question the authorized forms of the production of heritage.
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Artist Ingrid Falk outlines her preparatory experience of work on the collective performance. Working with and through a questionnaire, which she uses to gather audience reflections on the issue of heritagization and the role of cultural workers, she takes on the role of the research rabbit and cockroach-parasite.
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In the fragment of an essay, curator and researcher Tania Arcimovich collects personal reflections from the everyday life of cultural workers from Belarus. She questions why non-public and non-visible lives full of anxieties and affects hardly could be found in artistic bios and CVs.
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Anna Chistoserdova (Ў gallery, Minsk, BY), Nils Claesson (Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, SE), Linda Tedsdotter (Konstepidemin, Gothenburg, SE), and Oksana Haiko (KX, Brest, BY) discuss the opportunities for art, which is socially and politically engaged, self-organization of artists, and consolidation of effort to make change happen.
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Artist Denis Romanovski introduces the Question Card Game created in Gothenburg in 2017 during the development of the STATUS project. The game documents the discussion of the project, outlines its problematics, and invites participants to join.