BELARUS 25 MARCH
On 25 March 2021, a large exhibition, Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance, opened at the Mystetsky Arsenal in Kyiv. I took part in the exhibition as one of its six curators. The exhibition was dedicated to tactics of resistance and solidarity formed both in art and beyond, not only within the 2020–21 protests in Belarus but also since the end of the 1980s. More than 90 artists took part in the exhibition; the curators tried to show how art during the protests became an egalitarian instrument that no longer belonged only to professional cultural workers. The aim was also to represent the many tools and mechanisms held within contemporary art that allow the practice of resistance, the formation of connections and of common, shared experience – the creation, through political imagination, of new relationships, new structures, a utopian horizon of the future.
The central metaphor and conceptual idea of the exhibition was a network of solidarity. The largescale protests that began in Belarus in the summer of 2020 and continue to this day have a complex, branching network structure built around the idea of cooperation and opposing itself to the o cial structure of power. Belarusian dictatorship is built on the principle of a rigid hierarchy, while the protesters represent a horizontal, dynamic networked model, without leadership.
Even seemingly simple acts of resistance, such as the women who joined arms to form ‘chains of solidarity’, in a fact have a network nature. In the background is a large amount of support from those who are invisible but make it possible for others to take to the streets. There were cars circulating around protest actions, on hand to save the participants from detention; administrators and members on the Telegram messenger communities who tracked police wagon routes around the city; those who brought water or tea to the protesters; initiatives to help the victims; and so on – all together, they formed complex infrastructures without a single centre.
Such tactics emerged as a response to unprecedented violence. At this point, about 900 people have been recognised by the international community as political prisoners, and more than 1 percent of the country’s adult population has been detained during protests; cases of violence and even murder during detention have been known. One of the most important actions, which demanded the end to violence but also showed that protesters were not just abstract subjects but concrete, living beings whose bodies suer from pain and fear was the action The Art of the Regime.
On 15 August 2020, Belarusian cultural workers formed a chain of solidarity near the Palace of Art in Minsk, one of the country’s largest exhibition spaces, which belongs to a fairly conservative, pro-governmental community, the Union of Artists. This building houses the collection of Belgazprombank, the head of which, Viktar
Babaryka, had been arrested before the presidential elections. The cultural workers gathered at the protest held up photos of protestors who had been beaten by the police the previous week, while one of the artists undressed to show how his body had been beaten and mutilated during detention.
From the shock of powerlessness in the face of the repressive state machine, an understanding of kinship built on empathy, care, intimacy and support was born.
Indeed, the theme of caring and solidarity has been central to the work of many artists who created artwork during the protests. But what kind of solidarity are we talking about? Where are the boundaries of solidarity?
After all, solidarity can be not only a practice of inclusion but also a practice of exclusion. This is eloquently evidenced by the openly xenophobic comments of users on social networks, and articles by the majority of independent media, created in response to the current migration crisis on the border of Belarus and Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. The presence of thousands of refugees from Syria, Turkey, Iraq and other countries is generally not supported by Belarusians, despite the fact that during protests against the regime many Belarusians were forced to flee the country and into the exile forced upon these same refugees. As journalist Nasta Zakharevich noted on the platform, a division is emerging between ‘incorrect’ and ‘correct’ refugees. The former are denied solidarity, support and care, and are dehumanised, while the capacity for suering is monopolised by the more privileged Belarusian refugees.
It seems like the networks of solidarity, organised during the protests and still developing, do not necessarily have inclusive settings; access to these networks is not equal. Perhaps the toolkit of contemporary art, and the position of the contemporary artist as a mediator or connector, could still be important. Returning to the Every Day exhibition, I can metaphorically describe it as a refuge: the Ukrainian institution sheltered the work of artists and curators, providing space for expression that they are deprived of inside Belarus. This proves that support and inclusion have no boundaries. One of the artworks in the exhibition is a manifesto by artist Marina Naprushkina, in which she emphasises that ‘the state is not about making deals but about caring for the weak, the invisible, the excluded’. We might still envision networks of solidarity that do not work on principles of inclusion or exclusion, and extrapolate empathy and caring mechanisms not only for those close to us but also on those marked as ‘distant’ or ‘other’.
Antonina Stebur is a curator and researcher from Belarus