Inside Belarus Free Theatre’s Venice Exhibition on Authoritarianism

Upon entering the 13th-century church, the first thing viewers encounter is Watch the crossa sculpture created by the Kaliada family. The image is stark but powerful: a cross framed by CCTV cameras and railway tracks. Surveillance is an ongoing theme in the exhibition, and not just because of its association with Lukashenko’s regime. For Daniella Kaliada, who lives in London, considered the most surveiled city in the world outside of China, cameras have become one of the most ubiquitous symbols of contemporary life and governance.

“You know you’re being watched all the time, and that might give you a sense of security,” Cagliada said of London. “Yet we have the highest rates of knife crime, and perpetrators are rarely detected. So I think cross-cultural audiences are now able to recognize that. It changes the way the work is read, but it changes the nature of the work. Belarus is an entry point into questioning: Are we being surveilled the same? Are we all being surveilled, but in different ways?”

the installation continues to blend religious imagery and surveillance Systematic Confessionthe Kaliada couple turned the priest’s cubicle into a surveillance center and monitored the exhibition through various cameras. But the surveillance center also monitors observers, analyzing biometric markers on their faces in real time and generating data on their appearance, political status and mental health. While the confessional seems sinister enough, it’s disarming to see yourself being profiled in much the same way as social media algorithms as you sit in it, with the algorithm in the corner reinforcing that innocuousness by serving up the celebrities who most closely resemble you.

The sculpture is one of the only works not made specifically for the Venice exhibition european dogoriginally produced for the theater in 2022-23 european dogA drama based on a banned Belarusian dystopian novel. This sculpture depicts various banned books in Belarus, which is shocking both in terms of the number and breadth of banned books. Banned children’s literature is rarely considered dissident.

The exhibition employs a variety of artistic strategies to convey the restrictive and imposed order of the Belarusian experience. There is a picturesque wheat field in a cemetery near the main apse of the church. Wheat fields are Belarus’s main crop and the source of traditional handicrafts. Above it, Vladimir Tsesler created metal sculptures recalling folk art Pavukwhere straw is used to make hanging spiders. The wheat grew against its nature, wild and irregular, while the straw spider is now cast in hard metal, a temporary cultural practice that became permanent.

Throughout the exhibition, installations are placed beyond the visual realm. In the cemetery, next to certain groups of paintings, there is a sound installation that tells the story of the experiences of political prisoners in Belarus, voiced by key actors such as Jude Law and Gillian Anderson to protect their identities. A candle-activated olfactory installation by Ukrainian studio ol.factory fills the church with the smell of earth and rotting flowers, reminiscent of a freshly dug grave.

Throughout the exhibition, Grinevich, one of Belarus’s most renowned artists, creates site-specific crucifixion paintings designed to evoke memories and subvert altar panels. Here again, theater merges and blends religious and authoritarian symbols.