Inside Belarus Free Theatre’s Venice Exhibition on Authoritarianism

Upon entering the 13th century church, viewers first encounter Surveillance Crucifix, a sculpture created by the Kaliadas. The image is blunt, but powerful: a cross constructed from CCTV cameras and railway tracks. Surveillance is a persistent theme in the exhibition, not just because of its associations with the Lukashenko regime. For Daniella Kaliada, who lives in London, considered the most surveilled city in the world outside of China, the camera has become one of the most ubiquitous symbols of contemporary life and governance.

“You know you’re being watched all the time, which might give you a sense of security,” Kaliada said of London. “And yet we have some of the highest knife-crime rates, and perpetrators are rarely found. So I think audiences are now able to recognize this, across cultures. It changes how the work is read, but not what it is. Belarus is an entrance point into questioning: Is our surveillance the same? Are we all being watched—but being watched differently?”

The blending of religious iconography and surveillance continues in the installation Confessional of the System, where the Kaliadas have turned the priest’s compartment into a surveillance center that both monitors the exhibition through various cameras. But the surveillance center simultaneously watches the watcher, analyzing their face for biometric markers in real time and producing data about one’s appearance, political status, and mental health. While the confessional booth looks sinister enough, one sits down in the booth, it is disarming to see yourself analyzed in much the same way that social media algorithms might, a harmlessness reinforced by an algorithm in the corner that offers your closest celebrity lookalike.

One of the only works not made specifically for the Venice exhibition is the sculpture Dogs of Europe, which was originally produced for the Theatre’s 2022-23 production of Dogs of Europe, a play adaption of a banned Belarusian dystopian novel. The sculpture depicts various books banned in Belarus, which is striking both the sheer volume of books banned, and also for the breadth. Amongst the banned are children’s literature that one hardly thinks of as dissident.

The exhibition takes multiple artistic strategies to convey the restrictiveness and imposed order of the Belarusian experience. A picture-perfect field of wheat, a staple crop in Belarus and a source of traditional craft, occupies a cemetery off the main apse of the church. Above it, Vladimir Tsesler has created metal sculptures that recall the folk art of pavouk, in which straw is used to craft hanging spiders. The wheat is set against its nature, to grow wild and irregular, while the straw spiders are now cast in inflexible metal, a temporary cultural practice made permanent.

Throughout the exhibition, installations are placed that move beyond the visual. In the cemetery, and next to certain groupings of paintings, a sound installation recounts the experiences of Belarusian political prisoners, voiced by major actors like Jude Law and Gillian Anderson to protect their identities. An olfactory installation, activated by candles and designed by Ukrainian studio ol.factory, permeates the church with the smell of dirt and rotting flowers, meant to evoke a freshly dug grave.

Throughout the exhibiiton, Grinevich, one of Belarus’s most famous artists, has created site-specific paintings of the crucifixion that are meant to recall, and subvert altar panels. Here again, the Theatre blends and conflates religious and authoritarian symbols.