The art exhibition “Grapheme” – with a twist …

As we’ve recently announced, the art exhibition “Grapheme” was opened at Janka Kupala Museum in Minsk on March 13, 2009. It was supposed to unite works of leading Belarusian contemporary artists, which in one way or another communicated textual information.

But today it got a new twist - a number of pieces were banned by officials and were dismounted and replaced with different ones after having been on display for a week.

It seems like the exhibition was doomed from the very beginning. The first sign of this came up even before the opening. After the works had been already hung on the walls, a representative of the venue discovered that one of the works of Vladimir Tsesler, the most renowned Belarusian designer and poster artist, contained, let’s say, a Russian equivalent of the “F” word. Actually, that wasn’t exactly Mr. Tsesler, who “used” the word – his artwork just copied a wording from Victor Pelevin’s novel “Generation Ï” (extremely popular book by very famous contemporary Russian writer). Needless to say, that you can freely buy the quoted book at any bookstore in Belarus. But the artwork was banned and replaced before the opening by the similar one, this time without any arguable expressions.

 

 

Pelevin's cursing - all Vladimir Tsesler's fault

 

Anyway, the exhibition was opened as planned - it was visited by a Deputy Minister of Culture of Belarus and other officials and everything was going fine. However, six day after the opening, an article devoted to the exhibition was published in the major official newspaper “Sovetskaya Belorussia”. It was a short review, neutral overall, nothing special. But  the article met the eye and the injunction to shut down the exhibition followed first, to be downplayed to just replacing the exposition. As a result all the works from the initial exposition by Ruslan Vashkevich, two - by Antonina Slobodchikova, and one - by Mikhail Gulin and Vladimir Tsesler were dismounted. The motives for such a move is unclear; evidently there are no apparent political reasons, since all the “unwelcomed” artworks don’t touch the topic.

 

 

 

It is particularly remarkable that it’s for the second time in six months when the artworks have been banned from the exposition in Minsk. In September 2008, several works by Alexei Ivanov, Mikhail Gulin, Ruslan Vashkevich and Alexei Lunev were rejected from the 1st Belarusian Biennale of Painting, Graphics and Sculpture.