Belarus Free Theatre is bringing an installation described as capturing “totalitarian terror” and the fear of surveillance and intimidation to the Venice Biennale, with former political prisoners cutting golden stems of wheat to 90cm lengths in a studio in west Warsaw for shipment to Venice.
Who Gets Watched, Who Gets Broken
The work, Official. Unofficial. Belarus., is being built by people who know the machinery of repression from the inside. The installation includes a giant ball made of books banned in Belarus, including Harry Potter, works by Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich and an illustrated history of kink, resting on the claw of a bulldozer. It also uses the sound of laughter, organ music and an angle-grinder, with surveillance cameras attached to a towering iron crucifix.
Daniella Kaliada, 26, has been masterminding the project and said she was first interrogated by the Belarusian KGB when she was eight. She also remembers the day her mother was arrested at a protest in 2010. Daniella said, “Nikolai was at home and the doorbell went at 5am. I looked through the peephole and saw six men wearing masks. We sat in the house for six hours, with the doorbell continuously going, our dog barking and the phone ringing. When it stopped, the silence was deafening.”
Natalia Kaliada said she was detained for 20 hours and threatened with rape. She said, “You go numb, because the worst thing is not to have any control.” She also said friends were jailed for months and years, and that the husband of Daniella’s godmother was kidnapped and killed. Daniella said, “In jail, you don’t understand what will happen. And in that moment, your brain freezes.”
The Apparatus Behind the Curtain
Belarus Free Theatre’s co-founders, Natalia Kaliada and her husband Nicolai Khalezin, have been based in London since 2011. Khalezin said he had once wanted to represent Belarus at Venice decades ago, but was told by the government, “Here are the artists you can pick.” He said that since 1994 his homeland has been controlled by the dictator and Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko, who stole the last two elections and has imprisoned thousands of opponents.
The installation is intended to capture both the numbness of the detained and the fear of those left behind, and to make a wider point about digital curbs to personal freedoms. Daniella said, “Belarus is a unique authoritarian combination, but we can all relate to the idea of surveillance.” Natalia said, “In Belarus, I could go with friends to talk in the woods and leave the phone. Now it doesn’t matter whether you leave your phone – there will be drones. There is no place for a human to be safe.”
The Venice installation is not an official pavilion but a collateral event at the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista, because pavilions have to be requested by a ministry of culture. This year, for the first time since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has an official pavilion. Natalia said, “It’s a failure of international law and institutions. It’s inseparable from the world failure on Ukraine. Who is being legitimised? When the state says, ‘The pavilion is coming’, it means the machinery is coming, the money is coming.”
Russia’s pavilion is curated by Anastasia Karneeva, who runs an art consultancy with the daughter of foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. Her father is an executive at Rostec, Russia’s biggest defence contractor. Daniella said, “It is state-connected at the highest levels.” The Kaliadas hope the pavilion will become a focus for protest, with Pussy Riot promising a takeover, and prompt a review of the biennale’s constitution. Daniella said, “To allow any country to participate, regardless of politics, is outdated. If the Olympics can change, why not the biennale?”
Exile, Labor, and the Price of Refusal
The family also visited St Alexander’s, a Catholic church popular with Belarusians that stands on an island in the traffic. Composer Olga Podgaiskaya compared it to Noah’s ark, saying, “In the summer, people sit on the floor and it feels like we’re this circle of people who have survived something.” From the upper gallery, she played the organ piece she composed for Venice: a 20-minute sequence of alarms, crescendos and silences.
Podgaiskaya said her husband was kidnapped on a visit to Belarus last November, detained for 15 days and tortured. She said, “I wanted to scream. But when somebody goes to jail, you can’t be loud because they get beaten up.” She hopes people can hear that trauma in her piece, which is “a reminder that evil lives very close by. I also hope the government people who are watching us constantly – I hope I might heal them slightly.” Daniella said, “Of course,” when asked whether the KGB are among the audience, adding, “We’re very close to the border. If you think we’re not being followed – well, we are.”
Khalezin, who flew in for the day wearing a white overcoat and carrying flowers for his wife, said the ball of books is “a rereading of the Sisyphus story.” He said, “The ball has fallen from the mountain and crushed the arm of a bulldozer. Because when books are banned in Belarus, they are shredded and buried in the ground.” Khalezin also hosts a YouTube cookery show, urging Belarusian viewers via VPNs to watch, then delete and unsubscribe. One recent guest was Stephen Fry. Another was Rasmus Munk, who said his Venice contribution will take the form of a communion wafer to be served at the church venue. He said twenty versions were rejected for being too sweet or crunchy, and that the one Natalia and Daniella associated with a lack of hope dissolved instantly. He said, “It’s flavoured with a bud from the ‘toothache plant’ that leaves a numbing sensation, like Sichuan pepper.” He coloured it the grey of the Belarusian army uniform.
At the studio, Grinevich was working on two large canvases, one showing a row of naked figures crouching or praying and the other a crowd of young men in masks, similar to the view Daniella had through her peephole. Between them leaned a painting of a wheat field that will hang near a 3D version constructed from the stacked stems. Daniella said, “It will be very ordered, very lifeless.” Above it, they will suspend “straw spiders,” a Belarusian form of dream-catcher fashioned from prison bars by artist Vladimir Tsesler.
Grinevich said he left Belarus to be there and may never go back. He said, “I stand to lose a lot,” including his workshop, 500 art works and “the very beautiful house I built.” He studied for 12 years in Minsk, specializing in monumental art, and pointed to Belarus’s lineage of exiled painters: Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine and Nadia Léger, wife of Fernand. Before Lukashenko’s rule, Grinevich painted Soviet propaganda, including portraits of Lenin and murals for army buildings. He said today’s state art is “over-sexualised and amateurish,” marked by devotion to power rather than skill.
Daniella wanted him to tweak the masked men so there are echoes of other security forces, like America’s ICE agents, and to make them less Belarusian. She said, “Our ICE are not scary-looking. They’re young, pretty men from the provinces.” Natalia said the installation might not exist without the arrogance of youth, recalling that when a person of 26 decides to curate a major pavilion, she asked her daughter, “Why do you want to deal with art and politics? Stay away!” Daniella replied, “No, I must, because [younger] generations have to stand up.” Natalia said, “It’s about what we do now in order to have a future.”
Natalia said Belarus is no longer home but a collection of memories, including her mother’s pancakes and walks in the woods. She said their apartment was seized after they left and friends had to delete any trace of contact with them. Natalia said, “I cannot spend my energy running,” and said she is focusing on art. She said the next project is an opera based on The Elephant, a satire about repression by Belarusian novelist Sasha Filipenko in which an actual elephant appears in every home in the country.
Natalia said she wishes the status of Russia and Belarus at the biennale were reversed, with the Russians having to jump through hoops to be there. She said the effort of staging the project has shown her how powerful a force her people are in exile, and that more than half of it has been funded anonymously by Belarusian businesses. She said it feels especially important at a time when borders everywhere are tightening, and added that the fear instilled by an authoritarian regime takes a long time to ebb, if ever. She said, “That if somebody knocks on the door, it means I or Nicolai will be arrested. Daniella told me a couple of years ago, on a walk in Hyde Park, ‘It’s only now that I am slowly getting rid of that.’” Official. Unofficial. Belarus. is at Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista at the Venice Biennale, 9 May – 22 November.