The exhibition in programme of Krakow Photomonth Festival.
Artists: Hleb Burnashev, Ihar Hancharuk, Ala Savashevich
Curator: Adam Pańczuk
You don’t have to imagine it. It’s already happening right across the border, 200 kilometres from Warsaw. For wearing red socks with white pants, you can be arrested. If you park your white car next to a red car, you can also be sent to jail. If you park your red car next to a white car, then you are a saboteur. You have to think carefully about every move you make. You must exercise self-control. Everyone and everything is watching you. You can be accused of conspiring to bring down the system at any moment. The list of offences is long. If you think that even in Belarus something is surely not possible, there is a good chance it will happen. You purchase an LG television. You put the empty box on the balcony. The box is white and red.
The police show up to arrest you. You spend fifteen days in jail. White and red are resistance colours. The artists invited to participate in the exhibition dissect how the apparatus of the Belarusian dictatorship works. How models passed down through generations serve to engineer an ‘exemplary citizen.’ They shed light on crude propaganda. They detail shades of oppression and mechanisms of control. It begins in a seemingly innocent way, mothers dressing their children in soldiers’ uniforms, telling them they are defenders of the country, drilling war into them from childhood. Creating the perfect soldier. Or with a template of femininity passed from mother to daughter, formatting her to comply with the patriarchal model.
Within the context of the works in this exhibition, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s quotation becomes anything but abstract. His ‘artistic practice’ consists of primitive propaganda, summary arrests, torture, labour camps, and the ‘disappearing’ of those deemed enemies of the state. The exhibited works are a form of rebellion and protest. A personal revolution, a manifesto, an attempt to break away from the police state.
