"Belarus is beautiful, clean, but its soul is crushed by army boots." Belarusian Pavilion in Venice becomes a sensation

Photo: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya's press service

42,000 ears of wheat for Uladzimir Tsiesler's installation in the Belarusian pavilion at the Venice Biennale were inserted manually. Including by former Belarusian political prisoners. The cross with surveillance cameras, conceived by Daniela Kaliada, is made from railway tracks that led to Auschwitz. They were specially lent for the exhibition by the Polish side.

Siarhiej Hrynievich's paintings create a very chilling atmosphere. Christ on the cross with cameras — it's mind-blowing. The look of terror on Hrynievich's Madonna made me imagine the real horror of pain. On icons, the Mother of God is serene. But here, for the first time, I imagined how she might have looked in reality. There is a painting of a rye field by Hrynievich. The details make your eyes pop out of their sockets. No wonder one Swiss collector owns as many as 300 paintings by this Belarusian artist. Mikalai Khalezin holds in one shot that same tasteless host, created by Danish chef Rasmus Munk, the best chef of 2024 and 2025.

The stories of Belarusian political prisoners are voiced by Gillian Anderson, Stephen Fry (this is my favorite voice for English audiobooks), the voices of Joanna Lumley and Jude Law tell about Belarus. In one fragment of the exposition, there is the scent of a Belarusian prison and suffering, created by Ukrainian perfumers. The idea of a sphere made of banned books belongs to Khalezin himself. I didn't immediately see the excavator bucket under the sphere. This refers to the case when an excavator destroyed Baharevich's banned books in Belarus. But here, the sphere of books destroys this bucket.

I'm not a fan of contemporary art with pretensions to criticism. And I know Khalezin by reputation, so there's no reason to admire him on friendly terms. But what he, Daniela and Natallia Kaliada, the pavilion's curators, have done is magnificent.

Until I saw Khalezin's video about our pavilion, I thought that "selling" Belarus to the world should have been done more optimistically. Through love, beauty. But this is precisely about that, only with a story of how it is being crushed by army boots, by a police and anti-aesthetic state. And most importantly — it is faceless, tasteless, like Munk's host, and doesn't smell good, but stinks. Our Belarus is illustrated there by a rye field, beautiful, clean, over which our straw spiders hang (my grandmother made them in my childhood, and it was happiness for her when they spun, warmed by the stove's heat), but here the spiders are made of rusty rods, symbolizing prison bars. And all this accompanied by Olga Podgaiskaya's organ music. Belarus is shown there as a laboratory of the fight against freedom. No wonder everything takes place in a sanctuary, a house of love and beauty, where everyone in the pavilion is watched and not let go. And then interpretations follow. Rusty iron hangs over our field, but the field flourishes, blooms, fills with beauty, regardless of anything.

I am not surprised that out of 450 applications, the idea for the Belarusian pavilion made it into the top thirty winners. I am not surprised that the foreign press reacts so warmly to the Belarusian project. I highly recommend watching Mikalai Khalezin's 40-minute video. It's a fantastic tour. And a huge thank you to Khalezin himself, Natallia and Daniela Kaliada for how they show Belarus to the world and how they attract cool, world-renowned stars to our cause.

P.S. Irony of fate. After publishing the post, a person from Belarus wrote that they couldn't like the post, but wanted to. This is another "installation" about Belarus and proof of the project's authenticity in Venice.

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