Lesia Pcholka and Uladzimir Hramovich: In bureaucratic terms, we are nobody to each other
Lesia Pcholka and Uladzimir Hramovich: In bureaucratic terms, we are nobody to each other
Lena Prents and Jakob Racek conducted this interview in the run-up to the exhibition Fernbeziehungen (Long-distance Relationships) at KVOST. During the exhibition, Lesia (LES) and Uladzimir (ULA) are going to celebrate their wedding as a public performance.
Guys, so to get married – out of love or necessity?
ULA: There are questions as always – what is love and what is necessity? If we just answer “love”, we can just stop the interview right here. What else is there to add? In our case, first, there was love and almost immediately, there was necessity too. In Belarus during the protests in 2020–21, if your partner went to prison, only a family member had the right to see him/her and give them parcels of food and clothing.
The 2020–2021 protests in Belarus were the largest mass demonstrations since the Republic of Belarus was proclaimed in 1991, and so a historic moment. It became doubly historic for you personally: you decided to live together as a couple and work together as artists. Did you already work together before your romantic relationship began?
ULA: No. In fact, at the time, everything seemed unique and historic to us, even private matters were interwoven with political ones.
You both come from the very specific political context of Belarus.
Can you briefly describe it? What are the major (and minor) differences between Belarus, Germany and the EU in terms of society, state and politics?
ULA: After the Belarusian protests were brutally suppressed and thousands of people were arrested, others fled abroad in their thousands. It is estimated that a million Belarusians left the country and are now in the EU. So I think, in some sense, Belarusians are already a part of the EU. However, this is not recognised by anyone. Just as the country of Belarus was not recognised for decades. The situation has hardly changed since the 19th century, when Belarus was called the North-Western Region of the Russian Empire (from 1842 on). We are still facing the questions of survival as an independent political unit. We have one foot in the future and the other in the distant past. We cannot speak loudly and clearly about our sovereignty, and if we had done so, we would now be in the position that Ukraine is in. So the Belarusians are somewhere between “we don’t exist” and “we already exist”.
LES: There is an idea that we are the only ones left in Eastern Europe – ready for progress, but lacking the attention needed to solve existing problems and become part of the democratic world. To understand Belarus, you would have to carefully consider terms and historical facts. But at the moment, nobody is interested in that.
To what extent has your experience of displacement become an essential code of your work? In other words, how has your experience of emigration changed your artistic approaches?
LES: During the 2020 protests in Belarus, I moved from participatory practices and archival work back to photography. I documented the protests on a daily basis because international media were not accredited and could not enter the country. In this way, I created a new archive and shared materials. After 2021, I began to explore new approaches to documentation and ways to highlight the current situation in Belarus. One such project is “Invisible Trauma” (https://a-lesia.com/Invisible-Trauma), which deals with psychological violence. Many people close to me, including myself, have experienced imprisonment and many remain imprisoned. I felt it was important to speak out about these events and, as someone who is now free, to continue to draw attention to Belarus through my art. Four years later, I feel the distance is growing and other issues are emerging that I want to explore through my work. Today it’s important for me to put what happened in my country and my own experiences into a broader global political context. I am currently working on a book about the protests in Belarus and Hong Kong.
ULA: Whether we like it or not, the experience of displacement affects our methods and work. Here, we are invited to take part in exhibitions that already have an agenda. And instead of dealing with ‘pure’ questions of art – space, time, medium, aesthetics – I have to repeatedly delve into my experiences and traumas as a refugee. On the other hand, the state where we came from did everything in its power to stop us from dealing with politics and social issues. In Belarus, there was a kind of contract between the state and artists: the artists would not interfere in state affairs, and in return, the state would leave artists and intellectuals alone. So, under such conditions, it is really safer to just make art, to deal with abstraction or to use Aesop’s language. In Europe, it is already commonplace to talk, discuss and work with problems and politics – it is part of the political culture.
As for me, I live and feel my otherness here. The seam between “before” and “after” is becoming more visible, it seems to me. So, it’s not unique, it’s just different.
And our methods are changing. First of all, we don’t have a place to work and a place to store our work afterwards. So, everything becomes more mobile. You think about how your work can be recycled later, or where you can leave it. On the other hand, I have a great craving to make something with my hands. Probably all these experiences also lead to another desire: everything is so destroyed and lost that I want to do something that at least won’t be lost, like a movie shot with a phone. Although everything disappears.
Could you elaborate more on artistic practices in Belarus before and after 2020? There was more than just abstract art and Aesop’s language. What role did independent and critical artists play there and under what conditions did they work? How has this shaped your own artistic practice?
LES: Many artists in Belarus took on the role of cultural institutions themselves due to instability, limited resources and now the complete absence of such institutions. Contemporary art in Belarus has never enjoyed widespread support, and gallery spaces have always been largely inaccessible. As a result, before I emigrated, my artistic practice was more participatory and deeply connected to the political life of the community. One example of this is the Veha Archive (https://veha-archive.org), which I’ve been developing since 2017. This project doesn’t have an overtly protest-oriented stance, but it addresses fundamental social issues and gaps in historical accessibility while uniting the community in a process of preservation and participation. Since emigrating, my artistic language has changed significantly. Through my work I now have the freedom to speak about what matters to me, to create objects and to stimulate discussion about the current post-political situation. My practice has become more visual and involves less direct community work.
ULA: Before 2020, the artists sat in their studios and small galleries; it was a kind of permitted art life, but no more. In 2020, we occupied public space, became loud, and became visible, but we were trampled. Even if we temporarily lost, the very fact that bodies and art appeared in all public spaces in the country, in front of the usurper of power is something I consider very important, and it remains important, psychologically, politically and personally. This image cannot be erased, and if it happened then, it will happen again someday.
In your artistic works and projects, you regularly deal with questions of subjectivity, identity, state power, ancestry and origin. What role do experiences of state repression and forced emigration play here? The precarious life of a displaced person also seems to have an immense conceptual approach to your work. How would you describe this?
LES: As sad as it may sound, I felt there was a glass ceiling in Belarus, as I think many others did, which may have led to the 2020 revolution. Living in exile, I don’t feel like an activist; I have gained the freedom to be an artist. My condition is still so precarious, but I think it’s important to identify as a Belarusian artist, not to dissolve in the new world, but to show that we exist. And even just calling ourselves artists – during the Russian-Ukrainian war – can be a small act of activism. Working with a Belarusian artist like me is a reputational risk, and many European galleries tend to avoid such situations.
ULA: The migration disaster on the Polish-Belarusian border, with the Belarusian regime’s enormous complicity, showed what an immense role identity, origin and the history of refugees play when it comes to entering the EU. If we had fled from other countries and had different passports or had left for other reasons, the doors would be closed to us. I am always aware of this here.
Many of your works actually revolve around the topic of Belarus. What are you working through here?
ULA: History is probably the main thing in my practice, the blind spots of history and history itself as an object of manipulations and transformations. Perhaps I am trying to do speculatively what other generations who lived in this territory could not do for me because of wars, deportations, occupations, regime changes and so on. There is a lot of work to do, a lot to be done and redone, and there are ethical issues that bother me. Probably, if we had a more stable state called “Belarus”, I would not be so interested in it. We kind of work on two planes, in the artistic sense of making and finding something new and in the political sense of helping the weak, describing what they tried to destroy, becoming a prosthesis and an alternative institution.
LES: We were both working on the topic of Belarus topic before 2020. If there hadn’t been repression in my country similar to that in the 1930s, I might have been able to focus on something more abstract. After I left, I felt I had no right to speak, as if there was a limit to my sincerity. I was embarrassed to be mentioned in the context of an artist who had been imprisoned for participating in protests. Only this year I realized that I owe nothing to anyone; the fact is, I am a refugee. I cannot go back to my country and I am rebuilding my life in a new language, taking any job I can to feel stable again. I have different projects, and I always sincerely choose what I want to talk about.
For the Fernbeziehungen exhibition in KVOST, you are going to perform a marriage ceremony and a wedding. Judith Kele, a Hungarian artist, offered herself as a work of art at an auction in Paris in 1980. She married the Frenchman who was the highest bidder and was allowed to leave socialist Hungary a year later and move to France. The project of Serbian artist, Tanja Ostojic, “Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, (2000-2005) was even better known. What has changed in the situation of artists from Eastern Europe since these very strong feminist gestures were made?
LES: I can’t compare, but it seems to me that bureaucracy has become even more opaque, arbitrary and perfidious. Our focus is on the accessibility of the bureaucratic process of marriage for refugees. I can highlight two important aspects that often go unnoticed in legal systems. For example, artists by profession need to be mobile. We had to start from scratch to obtain essential documents: visas, permissions to work, tax numbers and so on. For more than a year, each of us has been confined to a single city without the right to move. And the country where we spent our first year is different from the one where we are now. I’m also not sure if we will still be living in Berlin when we get the right to register our marriage in Germany. But what is simple for others is not accessible to us as refugees. We cannot simply go to a Belarusian consulate to get a certificate of no impediment, as where we risk being arrested is legally considered foreign territory. There hasn’t been a case like this in Germany yet, but we certainly don’t want to be the first. For example, civil partnerships for same-sex couples aren’t relevant to our situation, and entering into a fictitious marriage for the sake of documentation is not our goal. We have already obtained the right to register in Poland through a court decision. Ideally, we would have this right in every country we live in, now and in the future, to create the same foundation that others have by default. It’s a kind of bureaucratic rebirth, a visibility of ourselves as interconnected subjects within the new systems we accidentally enter.
Lesia, you work with private photos that you collect through public open calls and organize in an archival way. You then usually structure the photo collections generated in this way thematically. One of these collections was dedicated to the topic of marriage. What motivated you to work on this topic? What did you come across during your research? What role did marriage play historically, and what role does it play today in Belarus? What role does it play for you and how has your perception of marriage and its significance for society changed as a result?
LES: The project was part of the VEHA archive and was called “Dziavočy viečar”. Its aim was to uncover photographs that capture moments of communication between women. This pre-wedding ritual has been well documented by ethnographers, but visual records are lacking. With the start of COVID-19, however, the project expanded to cover two themes, weddings and funerals, and to explore how these central family rituals were transformed during the pandemic. Our understanding of marriage took on a new meaning after imprisonment. For example, only relatives are allowed to bring clothes and essentials into prison. In bureaucratic terms, we are nothing to each other – just a couple. If something happened to one of us here in exile, we would not be able to support each other. In our case, marriage is about ensuring mutual support and recognition within the system.
With his “Homo Sacer” theory, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described existences that live on the margins or outside the law of a state, that is, precarious (and precious) forms of life that are constantly threatened with dehumanization, or with falling through the gaps of the respective system. However, he does not describe these forms of life as the exception, but rather as the paradigm of modernity. Accordingly, our political systems constantly produce individuals who are denied their own political or legal subjectivity. They are increasingly becoming the norm in the face of global movements of refugees, but also due to increasingly illiberal contexts and failing states. The loss of citizenship, of stable statehood, is addressed, for example, in your video work. What strategies have you developed as artists and as individuals to live in this world of increasing precarity? What do terms such as security and belonging mean to you then?
LES: The period when we spent an entire year without documents, unable to move freely, was extremely stressful. Each of us coped with this stress differently. Even after receiving residency permits, we constantly have to prove that we are suitable residents of this country. Working in the arts is particularly ambiguous and unstable from a bureaucratic perspective. Our lives now depend not only on the quality of the work we produce but also on institutions’ willingness to engage with Belarusian artists today.
The last two years have been a serious test for me; they have significantly affected my health and I don’t think I could have survived it alone. Working as an artist allows me to react quickly and create images through which I can talk about important things. Adaptability and quick reaction help me to cope with the constant instability we live in.
ULA: I agree. Everything feels like it is your last chance, and has to be done as fast as possible, and we often act as though this is true. But in Belarus, it was the norm, that’s what we already did. We did exhibitions as if they were the last. Sometimes I think that all the things that brought us to Berlin, all the political catastrophes, are catching up with us here again. So, the only solution is to act as precisely and as quickly as possible because there may not be any other time.
Lesia Pcholka is a visual artist and Memory Sister of the VEHA Archive.
Uladzimir Hramovich is an artist and curator.
Lena Prents is an art historian and curator. She currently runs the municipal Prater Galerie Berlin.
Jakob Racek is head of the information department at the Goethe-Institut headquarters in Munich. From 2018-2022, he was director of the Goethe-Institut in Minsk, which had to cease its activities due to the repression of the Belarusian regime.
