Critical assemblage. People and Atoms

April 7-17, 2015. Gallery 'Y", Minsk 

 

This project aimed at creating a research platform for storing, analyzing, and representing data on cultural history and anthropology of Soviet science, and was designed as a manual prototype of a website. As such, the exhibition allowed producing knowledge through accumulation and curating of data (such as interview transcripts, newspaper articles, photographies from private archives, and other documents), and creates a new form of expositing artefacts – a research exhibition. This model of a critical assembly had been borrowed from nuclear physicists. The exhibition was a part of Artes Liberales project (Minsk, 2015).

 

Roland Barthes: Key Words

May 29 – June 13, 2015. Art Gallery “Tsekh”, Minsk

 

Center of Visual and Cultural Studies at European Humanities University supported by The Embassy of France in Belarus organized an international conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of French researcher, writer, theorist of film and photography Roland Barthes. A unique part of this conference became exhibition “Roland Barthes: Key Words”. Exposition was composed of EHU students' projects.

 

Not Looking at Anything

March 3 - April 11, 2015. Winzavod - Center for Contemporary Art, Minsk

 

Originating as a single painting, this multimedia project includes photography, video, and installation, and is centered around the Adventures of the Gaze. The painting featuring four people looking down and left, has traveled across the city to different social spaces that are difficult to reach and often marked as awkward – striptease club, church, cemetery, dump, and others. Changing perspective, cropping a visible world in a new way, producing an unexpected focal point, constructing an imaginary world beyond the painting, the artist reminds us that art is always an art of seeing.

 

Finissage

October 17, 2013. Oktyabrskaya square, Minsk

 

A project curated by Almira Ousmanova and Ruslan Vashkevich is a field study in the format of one-day (October 17, 2013) art-intervention into Belarusian art market that aimed at exploring conditions and an overall process of transforming art into commodity. Professional artists and theorists (Adam Globus, Vladimir Tsesler, Andrei Liankevich, Sergei Seletsky, Masha Khrustaleva, and others) enter Vernisazh – an open-air art market at Oktyabrskaya square which is situated in the very heart of Minsk – in order to conceptually rethink it as a meeting venue for urban community where artists and connoisseurs meet their admirers, and where social boundaries are eliminated.

 

Museum

September 10 - October 10, 2011. The National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, Minsk

 

This project by Ruslan Vashkevich (curated by Almira Ousmanova) is a form of a critical intervention into the history of art and at the same time an attempt to rethink the ways of its representation in a classical museum, «the last bastion of ‘cultural respectability’» (P.Virilio). The «museum» created by Vashkevich is a museum without borders – in every sense of the word. It does not only erode the frontiers between past and present, art and non-art but also between old masters and contemporary spectators, classical painting and postmodern advertising.

 

Third Meaning

May 29, 2015. Gallery of Modern Art “TSEKH”, Minsk

 

"The Third Meaning" is an audiovisual installation that is based on the work of French philosopher Roland Barther "The Third Meaning" and uses S. Eisenstein's film "Ivan the Terrible" (1944) as primal material. The installation is designed as a research tool and at the same time a kind of instrument that allows experimenting with viewers' experience of 'reading' a filmic text. 

 

24h Solaris

February 27, 2014. Gallery 'Y", Minsk

 

“24h Solaris” is an audiovisual tribute to prominent filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and Douglas Gordon. The installation was firstly presented in Minsk during art & educational project Artes Liberales in 2014.