Exiled Belarus Free Theatre Brings Exhibition on Authoritarianism to the Venice Biennale

Cult-favorite art collective Belarus Free Theatre will stage a landmark exhibition about the effects of authoritarianism on artistic expression at this year’s 61st Venice Biennale. In the absence of an official Belarus pavilion, the project will celebrate art that survives in spite of state censorship and surveillance to become a powerful tool for resistance.

The exhibition, titled “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.,” is a group show presenting work by Belarusian artists who works challenge the long-standing authoritative regime in their native country. New paintings by Sergey Grinevich will fill the exhibition’s main venue, the Venetian church of San Giovanni Evangelista. Conceived and displayed like altarpieces, these works will use religious iconography to comment on contemporary threats to our privacy.

Other site-specific works also play with the sacred location. Nicolai Khalezin‘s installation of a book display crushed by a bulldozer is a explicit comment on the perniciously destructive erasure of art in Belarus, such that the spectrum of ideas becomes gradually narrowed over time.

The area immediately surrounding the church will also be taken over by the Belarusian artists. Just outside the entrance, viewers will become the viewed when they pass by a cross constructed out of CCTV cameras by Daniella Kaliada and Natalia Kaliada. The work plays on a disquieting sense that there are increasingly few places still scared from institutional attempts to observe and control.

The church’s neighboring private cemetery is the site of new sculptural works made from prison bars by Vladimir Tsesler, as well as a sound installation featuring testimonials by political prisoners who have recent served time in Belarus.

Founded in Minsk in 2005, Belarus Free Theatre is a critically-acclaimed performance non-profit that has produced more than 50 stage productions across more than 40 countries. Its two founders Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin sought political asylum in Britain in 2011, in recent years they hosted acting classes for Belarusian and Ukranian refugees in Warsaw.

Their exhibition is one of the Biennale’s 30 official collateral events. It remains on view for the Biennale’s full run from May 9 through November 22.

“We hope that this moment will resonate far beyond this year as we look forward to a future where Belarusian culture will reclaim its rightful place on the world stage,” said Kaliada, Belarus Free Theatre’s co-founding artistic director and one of the exhibitors.

Belarus has been under the authoritarian rule of president Alexander Grigorvich since 1994. In the decades since, artists whose work critically engages with this regime have been forced into exile, but Belarus Free Theatre locate the origins of this artistic lineage in the early 20th century, noting how leading modernists like Marc Chagall and Chaïm Soutine developed their experimental practices in Paris.

Government suppression of any artistic expression it regards as “extremist” has dramatically increased since the 2020 election, the first serious threat to Grigoryevich’s rule. Artists and cultural workers have been arrested, including the dissident painter and performer Aleś Pushkin, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2022 for exhibiting a portrait of anti-Soviet resistant fighter Yevgeny Zhikhar. He died under mysterious circumstances in 2023.

For many artists, the chance to exhibit in their country’s national pavilion is a career-defining achievement. Yet this opportunity relies heavily on the country’s political climate and economic priorities, as well as broader geopolitical realities. Belarus does not have a permanent pavilion and, though it has participated sporadically in the past, its last official, off-site pavilion was organized in 2019.

The Belarus Free Theatre is taking matters into their own hands by organizing an official collateral exhibition in lieu of an official pavilion. Kaliada described the collective as “an artistic constellation that is impossible to ignore, one that no state institution could ever assemble.”