The Belarus Free Theatre, an underground theater group in exile since 2020, announced Wednesday that it will stage the exhibition “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.” as an official collateral event of the 61st Venice Biennale.
The show, to be staged at the more than 1,000-year-old La Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, will open May 9, with a pre-opening during vernissage week from May 6–8. It will run through November 22.
Curated by Belarus Free Theatre cofounder Natalia Kaliada and curator of art projects Daniella Kaliada—who have been in exile from Belarus since 2011—the exhibition “will explore how art is made, censored, and experienced under authoritarian power and constant surveillance.”
“‘Official. Unofficial. Belarus.’ signals that Belarusian independent culture—not the regime—holds cultural authority,” Natalia Kaliada said in a statement.
“We, a collective of Belarusian artists, all now in exile, come from a country of world-class artists, thinkers, and cultural innovators, and we are proud to show our homeland to the world through their lens, not as it is defined by the state,” she continued. “Together, we form an artistic constellation that is impossible to ignore, one that no state institution could ever assemble. We hope that this moment will resonate far beyond this year as we look forward to a future where Belarusian culture will reclaim its rightful place on the world stage.”
In press materials, the show is described as creating a “twilight zone between spiritual tradition and a totalitarian present,” marked by new site-specific paintings by Sergey Grinevich that function as altar panels; an organ soundscape, Sounds of Silence, by Olga Podgayskaya; and a nearly nine-foot sphere composed of books banned in Belarus and compressed by a bulldozer claw, by Nicolai Khalezin.
An adjacent cemetery will feature a sound installation playing recorded testimonies of recently released Belarusian political prisoners, juxtaposed with large-scale sculptures made from prison bars by Vladimir Tsesler. Tsesler’s works reimagine the Belarusian straw pajak, or “spider,” a form of folk art.
An installation conceived by Daniella and Natalia Kaliada will be installed outside the church: Surveillance Crucifixion, a sculptural cross composed entirely of CCTV cameras. “The work will collapse the distinction between watcher and watched, questioning dynamics of power and allowing surveillance to enter the sacred space,” the press materials read.
Belarus, an Eastern European country bordering Russia and Ukraine, has been ruled by President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994 in what has been described as a “brutal and repressive dictatorship.”
Since the BFT’s founding in 2005, Kaliada and her husband, Nikolai Khalezin—both human rights activists—have used the theater to criticize and resist Lukashenko’s censorship and policies. In its early years, the group performed in unadvertised private apartments in Belarus, as well as abroad. Kaliada and Khalezin sought political asylum in the UK in 2011 amid increasing repression under Lukashenko. They continued to run BFT from abroad, using Skype to conduct rehearsals with actors in Minsk, the country’s capital, the New York Times reported in a 2023 profile.
In 2020 and 2021, the rest of the troupe was also forced into exile as repression intensified following widespread protests against Lukashenko and the Belarusian government. The demonstrations were in response to Lukashenko’s sixth presidential election victory, which many claimed involved falsified results of as much as 60–70 percent. Many troupe members initially fled to Ukraine before relocating to Warsaw, where many remain, working with Ukrainian and Belarusian refugees; others moved to the UK to join Kaliada and Khalezin.
