Belarus Returns to the Venice Biennale Through an Exiled Theater Company
Belarus reappeared at the Venice Biennale this month in a form that was deliberately unlike a national pavilion. At La Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, the Belarus Free Theatre opened “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.”, presenting the country not as a state presence but, in curator Daniella Kaliada’s words, as “a self-governing, self-authored cultural body.” It is Belarus’s first appearance at the Biennale in six years, and its first since the 2020 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
That political context is inseparable from the exhibition itself. The Belarus Free Theatre has lived in exile since those protests, and its Venice project extends the company’s long-running opposition to Alexander Lukashenko’s regime into visual art. Rather than staging a conventional theater program, the group assembled works by Belarusian artists across painting, installation, sculpture, sound, and smell, using the exhibition space to make authoritarian life feel immediate rather than abstract.
The opening encounter is “Surveillance Crucifix / Назіральнае Распяцце,” a sculpture by Daniella Kaliada and Natalia Kaliada built from CCTV cameras and railway tracks. Surveillance runs through the exhibition as both a local reality and a broader condition of contemporary life. Another work by the Kaliadas, “Confessional of the System / Спаведальня Сістэмы,” transforms a priest’s compartment into a monitoring station that analyzes visitors in real time, producing data about appearance, political status, and mental health.
The exhibition also includes “Dogs of Europe / Сабакі Эўропы” by Nicolai Khalezin, which addresses banned books in Belarus, including children’s literature. Additional works by Vladimir Tsesler and Sergey Grinevich widen the project’s scope, while sound recordings of Belarusian political prisoners, voiced by actors including Jude Law and Gillian Anderson, add another layer of urgency.
Taken together, the exhibition treats Belarus’s experience of repression as both specific history and warning. What once seemed geographically distant is framed here as a condition with wider reach — one that the Venice Biennale’s international audience is being asked to confront directly.
