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Meand a studio on a street in the west of Warsaw, a group of former political prisoners are cutting wheat stalks up to 90cm long and stacking them, ready to be sent to Venice Biennale. A huge ball made of books banned in neighboring Belarus – Harry Potter, Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, recorded history of kink – rests on the claw of a bulldozer. There is the sound of laughter, organ music and a grinder, while the cameras are fixed on a long iron cross.
This is official. Unacceptable. Belarus., the first major drawing project is Belarus Free Theater (BFT). Unusually, the work of the exiled group has no form but is made up of artists, sculptors, inventors and the man recently voted the best chef in the world. Rasmus Munk has been cooking food at his two-star Michelin restaurant in Copenhagen that will be tasted in prison under the regime, the story of the entire establishment. The smell is sent again: it will smell like a freshly dug grave in the Belarusian countryside at the end of August, laid with rotting flowers.
If all of this sounds too ambitious, BFT’s co-founders would be the first to admit it. Natalia Kaliada and her husband Nicolai Khalezin, who have been living in London since 2011, have created the most complex political theater in recent years, since 2007. Being Harold Pinter for the Olivier-nominated opera King Stakh’s Wild Hunt – but he never dreamed of making a show. Actually, it’s not true, says Khalezin. A former supervisor, he wanted to represent Belarus in Venice many years ago, but “the government told me, ‘These are the artists you can choose.'” Since 1994, his country has been ruled by a dictator and Putin ally, Alexander Lukashenko, who stole the last two elections and imprisoned thousands of dissidents.
Instead, their daughter Daniella Kaliada was the one who led the project. Today he walks around the steel cross in a baseball cap and loafers, making changes. The surveillance cameras were bought new but are being sandblasted to look like they are being damaged. Artist SERGEY Grinevich shows him a new accessory – painted green and white that is meant to look like seagull poo. Daniella thinks it’s too much and wipes it off. At 26 years old, he is used to fighting with artists who are older and more stubborn than him.
This includes his mother. My day starts at one of Kaliadas’ favorite cafes in Warsaw, where yellow mimosas hang from the ceiling and the room is buzzing with expats. Natalia wants me to try sirnikisweet cottage pancakes, but Daniella makes a face: “I despise them so much.” He feels the same about theater. He explains: “There is always a danger that a story is being broadcast.”
Mother and daughter are surprisingly similar – determined, warm, intelligent – and they disagree on everything: how to strengthen the team, the right amount of rust on the metal, what to represent the images of the Guardian. “But we agree on good things,” smiles Natalia. The way we beat our backs, how many nights do we cry? Nobody cares.
Daniella was the first he was interrogated by the Belarusian KGB when he was eight years old, and he clearly remembers the day his mother was arrested during protests in 2010. “Nikolai was at home and the doorbell rang at 5 o’clock in the morning. I looked at the door and saw 6 men wearing masks. We stayed in the house for six hours, ringing the doorbell continuously, our dog was barking, and the phone stopped.
Natalia was imprisoned for 20 hours and threatened with rape. “When you’re numb,” he says, “the worst reason is not being able to control anything.” His friends were imprisoned for months and years; Godmother Daniella’s husband was kidnapped and killed. In prison, you don’t understand what will happen, and at that moment your brain freezes.
Acceptable. Unacceptable. Belarus. he will try to capture both experiences: the numbness of the imprisoned, the fear of the abandoned. He also wants to give a broader account of the digital ways of human rights. Daniella said: “Belarus is a unique regime, but we can all agree with the idea of protection.” His mother adds: “In Belarus, I could go with my friends to the forest and leave the phone. Now it doesn’t matter if you leave your phone – there will be drones. There is no place to be safe.”
As the title suggests, their Venice The establishment is not an official forum but an “event” in the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista, because the pavilions must be requested by the Ministry of Culture. This year, for the first time since they conquered Ukraine, Russia has an official stadium. “It’s a failure of international laws and organizations,” said Natalia. “It cannot be separated from the failure of the country in Ukraine. Who is accepted? When the government says, ‘Pavilion is coming’, it means machines are coming, money is coming.”
The Russian Pavilion is managed by Anastasia Karneeva, who runs the art gallery and is the daughter of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. His father is an executive at Rostec, Russia’s largest defense contractor. Daniella said: “It is government cooperation at the highest level. Mr Kaliadas hopes that the stadium will become a place for protest – Pussy Riot promises to take over – and lead to a review of the rules of the biennale. Daniella said: “Allowing any country to participate, regardless of politics, is outdated. “If the Olympics can change, why not?”
We drive to St Alexander’s, a Catholic church popular with Belarusians who live on an island full of cars. Songwriter Olga Podgaiskaya compared it to Noah’s ark: “In the summer,” she says, “people sit down and feel as if we are a group of people who have survived something. From the top scenes, they play the organ they created for Venice: a 20-minute sequence of alarms, crescendos and silences.”
Last November, Podgaiskaya’s husband was kidnapped on a trip to Belarus, detained for 15 days and tortured. He said: “I wanted to scream. “But when someone goes to prison, you can’t scream because they are beaten.” He hopes that people will feel the pain in his piece, which is “a reminder that evil is very close. I’m also hoping for the government people who are always watching us – I hope I can heal them a little bit.” Is the KGB in his audience? Daniella, who has been translating, said: “It’s true. “We are very close to the border. If you think we are not being followed – then we are.”
As we drive to the studio, I talk to Khalezin, who rode that day, dressed in a white dress and carrying flowers for his wife. The book ball is his. “I’m re-reading the story of Sisyphus,” he explains. “The ball fell from the mountain and broke the arm of the bulldozer, because when books are banned in Belarus they are crushed and buried in the ground.”
Khalezin also hosts a YouTube cooking show, each week encouraging Belarusian viewers – joining via VPNs – to watch, then delete and subscribe. One recent visitor it was Stephen Fry. Another was Rasmus Munk, who later told me that his contribution to Venice would be in the form of communion bread, to be given to the church. Twenty versions were rejected for being too sweet or broken. Munk said: “Natalia and Daniella’s bond of hopelessness ended immediately. “It is decorated with a shoot of a ‘toothache plant’ that numbs the feeling, like Sichuan pepper.” He painted it like the gray uniform of the Belarusian army.
In the studio, Grinevich is working on two large canvases – one row of naked people kneeling or praying, the other a crowd of young men wearing masks, as Daniella saw through her nose. Between them rests a painting of a wheat field that will be hung next to a 3D model made from piles of wood. Daniella said: “It will be very structured, lifeless. On top of it, they will hang “grass spiders”, a Belarusian type of dream created from prisons by the artist Vladimir Tsesler.
Grinevich left Belarus to be here and may never return. He said: “I will lose a lot. “My work, 500 paintings, the most beautiful house I built.” He studied for 12 years in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, focused on the largest paintings, and points to the strong line of the world of exiled artists: Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, Nadia Léger, Fernand’s wife. After Lukashenko’s regime, Grinevich painted Soviet propaganda: portraits of Lenin and paintings of military buildings. He says that today contemporary art is “overly sexualized and childish”, characterized by its dedication to power rather than art.
However, he is not above following the instructions: Daniella wants to use masked men so that there are evidences of other security forces, such as American ICE agents, and make them less in Belarus. “Our ICE doesn’t look scary,” he says. “They’re pretty boys from the suburbs.”
In the past, Natalia told her daughter (very gently) because of her impatience with old artists, including – but the installation cannot exist without youthful arrogance. His mother said: “When a 26-year-old man decides to build a big gymnasium, I ask him, ‘Why do you want to do art and politics? And he says, ‘No, I have to, because the (younger) generations have to stand up.’ It is what we do now to have a future. “
Belarus is no longer home, Natalia says, but a list of memories – her mother’s pancakes, walks in the forest. Their house was ransacked after they left and their friends stripped them of everything they came across. Natalia doesn’t think about personal risks – “I can’t use my strength to run” – and prefers to focus on art. Next is the opera based on The Elephant, a story about oppression by Belarusian author Sasha Filipenko in which a real elephant appears in every house in the country.
Natalia wants Russia and Belarus at the biennale to be changed, that the Russian people jumped to be there. But the effort to create this project has proven to him how powerful his people are in exile: more than half of the money has been funded, anonymously, by Belarusian businesses.
It feels especially important at a time when borders everywhere are expanding, he says, adding that fears of an authoritarian government will take a long time to subside, if at all. “That if someone knocks on the door, then either I or Nicolai will be arrested.” A few years ago, while we were walking in Hyde Park, Daniella said to me, ‘This is where I’m going to take it easy.'”
Acceptable. Unacceptable. Belarus. is at the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista at the Venice Biennale, 9 May – 22 November
