While much attention—and controversy—has been generated in recent months over the return of Russia to the Venice Biennale, another outcast nation will also have its first presence at the global art exhibition in six years, albeit in an unofficial capacity: Belarus.
For the first time, the Belarus Free Theatre, an underground theater group, will stage an official collateral exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale. The show, titled “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.,” is set to explore how art is “made, censored, and experienced under authoritarian power and constant surveillance,” according to an official description. It’s a provocative and timely subject, made more so by the fact that the Belarus Free Theatre has been in exile since 2020, following widespread protests against President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the country since 1994 in what has been described as a brutal and repressive dictatorship.
Needless to say, “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.” is neither sponsored nor condoned by the Belarusian government, a fact that makes this subversive exhibition a direct challenge to the state-led narratives of not only the Russian pavilion, but those of other nations who have become increasingly authoritarian in recent years.
“This is, I believe, only the fifth time Belarus has been present at the Biennale, and for the first time not as a state, but as a self-governing, self-authored cultural body,” Daniella Kaliada, the company’s curator of art projects, told ARTnews in a recent interview. “This isn’t something inserted into Venice. It’s something that has been missing, the voice of unofficial culture representing what usually only a nation-state represents.”
Staged in the more than 1,000-year-old La Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, the exhibition will feature site-specific paintings, a sound installation, and large-scale sculptures that show what repression feels like.
“We didn’t want visitors simply to learn about a situation,” cofounder Natalia Kaliada told ARTnews. “We wanted them to pass through it: the architecture, feeling, sound, scent, sculpture, obstruction, surveillance, ritual, and bodily experience.”
ARTnews sat down with Natalia Kaliada and Daniella Kaliada to discuss the upcoming exhibition, the difference between official and unofficial representation at the Biennale, and how the context of the Theatre’s work has changed, as more countries’ governments turn authoritarian and repressive.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: Why is the Biennale the right place to stage this exhibition?
Daniella Kaliada: The Biennale is so obviously the “Olympics” of the art world. The visibility you get there is probably second to none. That visibility is a form of power. For a culture like Belarusian culture, which has existed on a periphery, as this parallel unofficial culture, that visibility stops being a passive moment and becomes a statement. This is, I believe, only the fifth time Belarus has been present at the Biennale, and for the first time not as a state, but as a self-governing, self-authored cultural body. There is no other context in which we would want to launch this movement of Belarusian unofficial culture. This isn’t something inserted into Venice. It’s something that has been missing, the voice of unofficial culture representing what usually only a nation-state represents.
Natalia Kaliada: Venice feels like one of the few places where questions of nationhood, visibility, power, and cultural legitimacy are staged so publicly—and that creates exactly the right context for “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.,” because the exhibition is precisely about what happens when culture is forced outside official structures and still continues to exist, speak, and create. This is not simply about bringing Belarus to Venice. It’s about reclaiming narrative space inside one of the world’s most visible art platforms. The Biennale allows us to place independent Belarusian culture not at the margin, but in direct conversation with the international art world.
Does “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.” represent a larger critique of the Biennale’s structure, and the way that so much of what you see in Venice reifies the nation-state?
DK: The fact that we were selected as a collateral event—out of some 400 applications for very few places—shows that there is a demand for this distinction to be made visible: the distinction between representation and authorship. Most of the pavilions are state pavilions that represent governments, and what governments want to represent varies enormously across nations. We position ourselves entirely outside of that. The Biennale is allowing us to make that distinction visible, allowing unofficial narratives to re-enter a space that has long been reserved only for what official governments want to say. Even though there is always controversy around who is showing what, the fact that we are there representing artists who have been jailed and exiled—in our country, there are artists who have been killed for their art—is a significant step. And maybe it’s even outside the Biennale’s own comfort zone.
A work in progress by Sergey Grinevich for “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.”
Photo Tina Zaborowska
How has exile changed the Belarus Free Theatre’s relationship to the work it does?
NK: Exile removes the illusion. It also clarifies what must be protected… Repression is never purely visual. It is spatial, sonic, and atmospheric. It affects how you move, how you listen, how you think, how you breathe, how you anticipate danger, how you experience silence. That’s exactly what we plan to convey, because the multi-sensory form is essential. We didn’t want visitors simply to learn about a situation. We wanted them to pass through it: the architecture, feeling, sound, scent, sculpture, obstruction, surveillance, ritual, and bodily experience. They all work together to create a system, not an illustration. The point is not immersion for its own sake. The point is to allow the body to understand something that language alone often cannot fully carry. And that is precisely why we moved from theater language into contemporary art.
DK: I think it’s about the fact that we’re not trying to represent a country the way a national pavilion would. We’re not representing a state. We’re inducing a state of body and soul. One of the big influences on the exhibition was Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish [1975], in which he writes that punishment should strike not just the body but also the soul. That is why we have so many multidisciplinary and multisensory elements. Even though we are creating a system with the exhibition, the most effective systems are those you stop noticing. But equally, nothing is harder to represent than absence, which is why we’re trying to make it physical.
Belarusian artist Vladimir Tsesler, who has made new sculptural works made from prison bars for the exhibition.
KANAPLEIDIKI
It strikes me that Belarusians have been experiencing this kind of oppression for a long time, but it seems like it’s becoming more universal, if not quite at the same intensity, in the US and elsewhere. Does that change the context of the exhibition?
DK: We’ve talked about it a lot among ourselves, because while our exhibition is called “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.,” Belarus isn’t really an outlier—as it’s often framed. Growing up, every newspaper called Belarus the “last dictatorship of Europe.” But for this exhibition, Belarus is a prototype, not an exception. We’re proposing to entirely rethink it as an early model of a condition that is now global. Natalia, in her earliest interviews, from the foundation of the company, has been saying that dictatorship is contagious. And I think now it has proven the extent to which we’re all diseased.
What has changed is not the representation, which has become identical everywhere, but that certain mechanisms have become recognizable across contexts. The idea that visibility equals safety no longer holds. Even when I think of surveillance: I left Belarus when I was quite young, so for me it has a duplicitous meaning. London is the most surveilled city in the world—every square meter has multiple cameras pointing at it. You know you’re being watched all the time, which might give you a sense of security. 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?
NK: The experience feels more legible to more people now. Not because all situations are the same, but because many people are beginning to recognize patterns that once seemed distant: surveillance normalized as convenience, truth lines blurred and destabilized, fear internalized, language manipulated, public life shaped by invisible systems of control. That does change the work, and it doesn’t make Belarus less specific—it continues to function as an entrance point. But at the same time, it makes the exhibition more widely readable. What once seemed like a story from the periphery can now be understood as a warning from the edge of a condition that is spreading. That’s one of the central stakes of “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.” It’s not asking audiences to look at Belarus from a safe distance. It’s asking them to recognize something uncomfortably close to home.
Belarus hasn’t participated in the Biennale since 2019, which was the same year Russia last participated. Now Russia is returning. Did it feel urgent to establish a presence before Belarus attempts to return officially?
DK: It’s very interesting that this has coincided, because we of course had very different internal deadlines from the Biennale process. I think they may have had quite a difficult time managing it, because on one hand they had us—an exhibition that goes entirely against the state narrative and demonstrates that independent voices, no matter how many times you try to squash them, will reorganize and exist somewhere else and eventually represent what a nation truly is. On the other hand, the fact that Russia is showing, and that Belarus will most likely show again one day, demonstrates that state pavilions represent governments. It shows there is a need for a different outlet for different views, and that a cultural position that exists completely independently, outside the state, should be heard at the same level.
NK: It’s exactly the question: who gets to represent the country, and under what conditions? And that question is not abstract for Belarusian artists—it is lived reality, when voices are silenced. Our main purpose is to make those voices loud. This is why we say it’s not about Belarus Free Theatre, it’s not about the state, it’s not about any territory. It’s about independently and officially declaring, once again, that the unofficial, independent culture of Belarus exists, and that it’s time to bring it back into the European family.
