Numbness and fear. Belarusians participate in the Venice Biennale with a stunning pavilion MANY PHOTOS
A gloomy atmosphere of totalitarianism was created in a medieval church — a cross covered with surveillance cameras, red light, and a wheat field. And an unusual dish prepared by one of the world's best chefs. We show what the Belarusian exhibition looks like at one of the most prestigious art festivals. And for Hrodna artist Siarhei Hrynievich, the biennale will be a point of no return.
Belarus in Venice this year opens with banned books, surveillance cameras, and prison bars. With sounds that remind of fear. With a culture that has long lived outside state walls but still reclaims its right to be called Belarusian.
The exhibition «Official. Unofficial. Belarus» opens in Venice as part of the program of one of the world's main art events — the Venice Biennale. It was created by the Belarus Free Theatre team together with artists and composers. The project curators are Natalia and Daniela Koliada.
Maria Kalesnikava and Viktar Babaryka were present at the opening. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya also visited the exhibition.
The 61st Venice Biennale runs from May 9 to November 22, 2026, under the title In Minor Keys. The central exhibition features 110 invited authors, collectives, and art organizations, alongside 100 national representations.
Voice of Belarus
The exhibition title «Official. Unofficial. Belarus» sounds almost like a political formula. These are two Belarusias: one with state flags and control, the other with underground performances, emigration, political prisoners, and banned names. Therefore, the presence of independent Belarusian artists in Venice is a dispute over the right to answer the question: who today has the moral right to speak on behalf of Belarus?
The idea of an independent Belarusian presence in Venice was born last year. Daniela Koliada tells Nasha Niva that she and her mother, Natalia Koliada, co-founder of the Belarus Free Theatre, came to Venice for the opening of the Theatre Biennale. There they met the president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, and pitched their idea to him.
But the Biennale system works differently: a national pavilion can only be submitted through state structures — in fact, through the Ministry of Culture. Therefore, the Belarus Free Theatre submitted the project as an official parallel event.
«We had to go through a competition,» Daniela says. «There were about 400-500 different organizations and artists presenting their projects. The Biennale selects approximately 16 to 30 of those that best fit the year's concept.» The team learned that the Belarusian project had been selected at the end of December. They had about five months to prepare.
Daniela Koliada says: with their project, they wanted to make the first step, from which other artists and institutions could build in the future and participate in major festivals.
The Belarusian exhibition is located in the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista. The project is conceived as a multi-sensory experience: it should not only be seen but also heard and felt physically.
Initially, the exhibition's concept was formulated as "a meditation on the end of privacy," primarily in the sense of cybersecurity and human control through technology. The first image that emerged for the team was a cross made of video surveillance cameras. The entire exposition began to build from it.
The church was chosen not only as a beautiful historical space. Daniela Koliada explains that the location itself suggested part of the concept. In the Soviet Union, the state tried to take the place of religion — to assume the role of an omnipresent and all-seeing eye. According to the curator, today an authoritarian state does something similar: it claims full knowledge about a person, their movements, connections, words, and even fears.
The exhibition is built on this contrast: an old sacred space, where people once spoke with God, confronts modern surveillance technologies.
Inside the church are paintings by Hrodna artist Siarhei Hrynievich, conceived as peculiar altarpieces. These are familiar images, but from unusual, unexpected angles.
For Hrynievich himself, participation in the exhibition became, in fact, a point of no return. Daniela Koliada says that after 2020, the artist could no longer normally show his works in Belarus.
«He understood that if he participated in the exhibition, he might never be able to return to Belarus,» Daniela says. «And he left Belarus the day before our participation in the Biennale was announced in March.»
Works by artist Siarhei Hrynievich. Photo from the artist's Facebook
Nearby, in a niche of the church, is an installation by Mikalai Khalezin, co-founder of the Belarus Free Theatre: a large sphere made of books banned in Belarus, resting on a bulldozer's scoop.
Composer Volha Padhaiskaya created organ music for the exhibition — a sequence of anxieties, crescendos, and silences. The Guardian writes that in November her husband was detained for 15 days during a trip to Belarus. There was a threat of prolonged imprisonment. «I wanted to scream,» the composer says. «But if someone is in prison, you can't be loud, because they will be beaten.» She hopes that this trauma can be heard in her music and that it will serve as a reminder: evil lives very close.
The project also includes a work by designer Uladzimir Tsasler: from prison bars, he assembled straw spiders — a traditional Belarusian amulet, which in this space acquires a completely different, alarming meaning. Testimonies of former political prisoners are also played here: they are read by world-renowned cultural figures, including Stephen Fry and Gillian Anderson. The exhibition also works with a scent, specially created for this space, and with taste: Danish chef Rasmus Munk, called one of the most provocative and best chefs in the world, devised a gastronomic element that conveys the experience of imprisonment under an authoritarian regime.
Rasmus Munk is the head of the Copenhagen restaurant Alchemist, which holds two Michelin stars and is among the world's most famous experimental restaurants. The idea arose from conversations about the experience of political prisoners and the role of food in prison: how quickly its taste and quality lose significance when food becomes part of a system of humiliation and control.
Munk created round wafers the color of Belarusian prison uniforms. They are made of methylcellulose and melt in the mouth as soon as they touch the tongue. But they contain spices that temporarily numb the tongue and part of the face.
«It's a metaphor for freedom and hope, which you cling to until the last moment, but it disappears,» Daniela explains. «Ultimately, only a memory remains in the form of a slight numbness in the mouth.»
At the entrance, visitors are greeted by a cross assembled from video surveillance cameras. This is one of the most powerful images of the exhibition: it combines the religious symbol of suffering with a very modern feeling that a person is constantly under someone's watch.
One of the exhibition organizers, Natalia Koliada, co-founder of the Belarus Free Theatre, explains in an interview with the media that the creators aimed for visitors not just to «learn about the situation,» but to go through it: through sound, smell, observation, and bodily sensation. In other words, the exhibition tries to show how repression settles in the body: in how a person listens to footsteps behind the door, how they react to a call, how they fall silent when they are afraid of harming loved ones.
Sphere of banned books
One of the most striking objects of the exhibition is a huge sphere of books on a bulldozer's scoop, which have been openly banned or pushed out of the public space in Belarus.
Among them are "Secondhand Time" by Svetlana Alexievich, "Gulag" by Anne Applebaum, "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov, "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi, "The Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger, "Trainspotting" by Irvine Welsh, "Lullaby" by Chuck Palahniuk, "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides, "Modern Encyclopedia for Girls" by Katia Denisova and Marina Mentusova, "Belarusian National Idea" by Dzmitry Lukashuk and Maksim Harunou, "Violence" by Sasha Charnukha, "Where are you going, Wolf?" by Eva Viežnaviec.
This selection looks absurdly broad: documentary prose about Soviet experience, research on the Gulag, 20th-century classics, a graphic novel about life during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, books on gender, corporeality, sexuality, psychological trauma, violence, and personal freedom all find themselves in one field. And it is in this diversity that the main essence of the installation lies.
Belarusian censorship is not afraid of one specific genre or one specific idea. It is afraid of everything that teaches people to remember, to doubt, to compare, to call things by their names.
According to Belarusian PEN, 336 books are currently banned in Belarus for political or ideological reasons, over 280 authors are under ban, and five independent publishing houses have been liquidated.
«No place where a person can be safe»
Daniela Koliada says that all works for the exhibition were created specifically for this project: nothing was ready in advance. First, the team worked in Warsaw, and in April, they moved the works to Venice. The last three to four weeks before the opening, installation and final touches were done on site.
An important part of this work involved people who had recently been released from Belarusian prisons. According to Daniela, after their release in December, many found themselves in Poland without work, but with a need to feel a community again. Therefore, those who wanted to join helped the team.
The names of these people are not disclosed. «They all wished to remain anonymous,» Daniela explains. «The project attracts a lot of attention from the authorities, and no one wants to put their families or friends still in Belarus at risk.» According to her, it was thanks to this help that the team was able to physically assemble the exhibition.
This exhibition tries to capture two states simultaneously: the numbness of someone who has been imprisoned, and the fear of those who remained outside. But it doesn't stay only in Belarusian 2020. Daniela Koliada, in a conversation with The Guardian, says that Belarus is a «unique authoritarian combination,» but the very feeling of surveillance is understandable to many today. Natalia adds even more harshly: previously in Belarus, one could leave their phone and go talk in the forest; now even that doesn't help.
«There is no place where a person can be safe,» she says.
Why this is important
Previously, Belarus has appeared at the Venice Biennale — in 2019, as well as in 2015 and 2009. Back then, the Belarusian national pavilion was prepared by official structures: the Ministry of Culture, the National Center for Contemporary Arts, with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of Belarus in Italy. Against this backdrop, the current presence of Belarus in Venice looks fundamentally different: as the voice of independent culture.
There is an important intonation in this exhibition — Belarusian culture does not ask for pity and does not demand to be pitied. It is about the right to be present. About the fact that the country can be represented by independent artists, composers, people in exile — those who did not receive permission, but still speak.
It is easy to express predictable skepticism about the exhibition: supposedly, Belarus is again shown and explained to the whole world through repression, prisons, censorship, and exile. All, it's tiresome. But the problem is not that Belarusian art again speaks about repression. The problem is that repression in Belarus does not end. Silence only helps those who would like to erase this, rewrite it, and make it invisible.
For Daniela, this exhibition is not only about Belarus. Belarus here is a point of entry into a much broader conversation.
«People from Thailand, Hong Kong, Iran come to us and see in these works not our history, but their own,» she says. «This is not a story about repression. This is a story about how the best form of control is the control you stop noticing.»
In this sense, the Belarusian exhibition in Venice offers the viewer to look at their own country and their own life, where surveillance has already become a convenience, where data collection looks like a service, where a person gradually turns into a set of information about themselves.
«The most valuable thing today is no longer people themselves, but what we represent as our data, code,» says Daniela.
Therefore, the exhibition also uses the Belarusian experience as a mirror for a world that itself is moving towards increasingly subtle and invisible forms of control. Belarusians simply already know what it looks like when the system stops hiding its power over a person.
The Belarusian exhibition in Venice appears at a very sharp moment. This year, Russia returns to the Biennale — for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This caused a big scandal: the international jury of the Biennale resigned, and protests took place around the Russian pavilion. «Enjoy the spectacle, ignore the war,» read a poster by one of the protesters against the Russian exhibition. Because it is completely apolitical, as if there is no war, no Putin, no «Novichok.» The Belarusian pavilion is completely different from the Russian one.
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