Month: October 2022

Relentless flow of time

Working on the art installation Relentless Flow Of Time / 2022 for the art festival Hvitsten Salong has been an important and interesting experience for me. It was especially important to me because it was the first time that I exhibited my art in Norway. I was interested in the Norwegian history and local context, the topics that contemporary Norwegian artists work with and my encounters with Hvitsten Salong’s creative community and the participants with different stories and backgrounds.

This festival showed me that the art community in Norway is developing in a friendly and supportive atmosphere, welcoming people with different histories and cultural contexts. I was happy to meet many artists whose names was not already familiar with. I met those whose practice is close to me both in terms of artistic strategy and the themes that contemporary artists work with. I was pleased to get good feedback on my work from local artists and was pleasantly surprised at how hospitable they were.

Another important point for me is that this is the first work I have shown outside a gallery space. So for me this experience is still important as a step in the development of personal professional tools, which is important for an artist whose practice is mainly related to gallery and museum spaces.

I also felt comfortable working on the preparations for the festival whilst being in Hvitsten itself, with the warm and caring support of the Safemuse team. The fact that no one restricted my ideas, did not correct or censor me – neither in the process of reflection on the work, nor during the creation of the installation is of great importance to me and cannot be underestimated. For me, as a Belarusian artist, this is an important and valuable aspect, which I emphasise, because in Belarus, making such a work is simply impossible. To work in Belarus with any statement that touches on social or political issues can lead to imprisonment – it is a restrictive and limiting condition, which binds the artist’s hands and takes away his or her voice. That is why I am happy to have the chance to show my voice, to have the right to a personal manifesto, not to leave unnoticed and invisible those topics of concern in countries where crimes against humanity and crimes against artists are taking place right now.

It was important for me to show work that has a difficult conceptual side. It refers to events which are important for the current history, which on the one hand is important to fix, but on the other hand is also ephemeral and unstable – like everything that happens in the era of post-truth, digital oversaturation and devaluation of meanings. Therefore, it was conceptually important for my work in interaction with the natural environment – which always corrects and puts everything in its right place.