History of Belarusian Vyzhyvanka Webinar

00:10 - And I would like to welcome you on behalf of the International & Area Studies Department at the University of California in Los Angeles.

00:22 - And I would like to welcome everybody, who participated our speakers – and everybody who is attending – or our audience.

00:33 - The title of our webinar is the History of Belarusian Vyzhyvanka And it is important to show respect for both the historic culture and the contemporary presence of American Indians throughout California.

00:53 - And especially in the Los Angeles area Therefore, the UCLA Library acknowledges our presence on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva people. This webinar was created with many helping hands.

01:16 - I would like to thank and express my gratitude to my colleagues who graciously contributed to our event. My thanks goes to Jennifer Osorio, Head of the International & Area Studies and Director of Special Collections.

01:35 - Library Assistants: Alice Hunt, who is focused on Slavic, East European, South Asian and Pacific Island Studies.

01:46 - Gissel Rios, Western Europe and Outreach Coordination Library Research Student Assistants: Julia Tanenbaum and Syann Lundsford Our UCLA Library Administration: Suzy Lee, Public Affairs Manager Benjamin Alkaly, Communications Manager And also UCLA Humanities Technology: Nick Schweiterman, Research and Instructional Technology Consultant. And, also, we have sponsors, which is the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures Chair of the Department and Professor, Dr.

Ronald Vroon and Dr. Roman Koropeckyj Another sponsor is the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies With Laurie Hart, Director and Professor of Anthropology and Sanja Lacan, Communication and Outreach coordinator.

02:59 - We would also like to thank Contemporary Belarusian Magazine called Chrysalis Mag. Belarusian resistance, which started in 2020, is a series of ongoing political demonstrations and protests against the Belarusian government and President Alexander Lukashenko The largest anti-government protests in the history of Belarus The demonstrations began in the lead up and during the 2020 presidential election in which Lukashenko sought his sixth term in office.

03:47 - The focus of this webinar is to show how art is a means of protesting a means to increase the voices of the oppressed citizens of Belarus. Art has been essential during the protests.

04:04 - Citizens communicated by painting murals, putting up decorations and penning songs. These are messages that the dictatorship cannot silence.

04:20 - They are the emblem of resistance. One of the artists is with us today to share her special art: embroidery Her name is Rufina Bazlova It is my honor to introduce our webinar speakers and especially the curator and moderator, Dr. Sasha Razor. Sasha is native of Belarus and an alumni of the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures. In June 2020, she completed her dissertation on the Russian screenwriters of the left front of the arts.

Besides the avant garde cinema and literature, her research interest focuses on Belarusian and Ukranian literature and culture, post-colonialism, visual arts, and diasporic and women studies. In 2020, Sasha received an internship grant from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

05:39 - She completed her internship at the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco.

05:45 - Please welcome Dr. Sasha Razor. Thank you, Alena for the introduction and thank you for hosting us and the exhibition. It is such a pleasure to be here. The idea behind this exhibition is straightforward and angry.

06:01 - At the beginning of the Belarusian revolution, the mustachioed dictator said that the protests in Belarus had been manipulated from abroad, from Prague, by some so-called Czech puppeteers. And of course, Prague is famous for its puppetry. But Prague is also the location for the independent media outlets covering the events in Belarus.

06:25 - So, this is the context informing our Webinar Today, we are going to meet one actual Czech puppeteer, Rufina Bazlova. Rufina’s work popped up in my social media feeds back in August during the first days of the protests.

06:40 - And her art immediately went viral because it hit a nerve articulating what many of us had been feeling during those very difficult days.

06:50 - This was back when the country’s internet was down for three days in a row There was incredible violence happening on the streets of Belarus and in its prisons.

07:01 - We knew about massive detentions back then, rubber bullets, and stun grenades. What we didn’t know about, however, was how many were missing, how many were wounded. We did not know about the use of torture in jails. And we didn’t know about a concentration camp built specifically for the protesters which was already in operation. During these very difficult weeks, I saw Belarusian artists turn to the medium of embroidery both posting online and coming together at the Minsk Ў gallery space, performing a protest ritual of sorts, embroidering the documentary events which they were living through as a communal praxis.

07:46 - Now, in the Western contemporary art tradition, textiles have already been on the charts for at least half a century now And the current spike of interest in such things as conflict textiles, craftivism or most recently, Bernie Sanders’s mittens builds on the massive groundwork already laid by ethnographers, folklorists, feminist textile artists, and activists of all creeds. It is different in Belarus because, on one hand, our contemporary art has been used in this medium only sparsely only for the past decade or so.

08:24 - But on the other, textiles are at the heart of our traditional culture, and women continued to even weave let alone embroider in some villages throughout the 1980s.

08:37 - The first serious research on this subject didn’t emerge until the very late 1990s. And, therefore, the work which you will see today is one generation removed from the archaic folk tradition which has seen some ruptures and yet it is a part of our cultural memory and a code that we share as a community. Doing this exhibition during the pandemic means that we can only come together online. While such an endeavor has its own challenges, it also offers new opportunities.

A curator in me wishes that we were opening at a gallery or museum space where we could use digital media alongside with some very traditional textiles or install some 3-D objects to create a variety of viewer experiences. But a scholar in me rejoices that our journey with Rufina is beginning at the UCLA library because I admire all those courageous librarians who work on the front lines, archiving protest legacies around the globe and preserving them for the future.

As of today, Belarus doesn’t have a centralized archive of its contemporary art. And to address this problem, together with Nadzeya Makeyeva, the founder of Chrysalis Mag, we’ve assembled all the data that exists online in a separate section of our website. I have also included the pARTisanka archive as a separate exhibit because it is perhaps the single most important multi-media project archive from Belarus that documents its contemporary culture scene from 2002 onwards.

Its founder, Artur Klinau, was an artist-in-residence at the UCLA department of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Languages and Cultures back in 2017 And together with Lidya Roberts, we curated an exhibition for him at the UCLA Powell Library entitled The Dream of Revolution. And I deliberately selected this title with a purpose, knowing that this day would come. And here we are today, four years later. I’ve assembled a curator’s tour of Rufina Bazlova’s art which walks you through the major events of the Belarusian Revolution-in-Progress.

As you can see from the list of today’s speakers, everyone is located outside the country because it is increasingly dangerous to be an artist in Belarus and this community is a target. I did not want to compromise anyone’s safety, even remotely, by including their name on the program. However, I also know that there are several artists and friends who are listening to us in Minsk, where it is past the midnight right now.

And I hope that they will comment during the discussion. Now, without further ado, I would like to introduce our keynote speaker. Rufina Bazlova is a Prague-based multi-genre artist who’s in illustration, comics, artist books, puppet-making, scenography, performance, and costume design. Rufina holds her undergraduate degree in stage design from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and an MFA in Illustration and Graphic Design from the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art from the University of West Bohemia.

12:00 - In addition to her protest art, she is also known as the co-founder a group of puppeteers called Herring Beneath the Fur Coat, And their play, RAW, was recently nominated for the Greenhorn Award at the prestigious Figura Theatre Festival in Baden, Switzerland. So, let us welcome, Rufina. Thank you, Sasha.

12:23 - So, sharing screen. Good afternoon. My name is Rufina, and I’m joining you from Prague today.

12:31 - It’s something past 10pm in Prague, so my room is a bit dark.

12:37 - This is one of my first public talks in English, so, if I make any mistakes, please forgive me.

12:44 - But let’s start from a map of Belarus. I was born in Grodno.

12:49 - The city is located in Western Belarus on the border with Lithuania and Poland.

12:54 - For some time, we were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth.

13:01 - The protests in Grodno are among the most active in Belarus except for Minsk.

13:09 - In the picture, you see the center of my hometown.

13:12 - This is the Cathedral and the prison is right next to it. Back in August, people gathered right by the prison walls and sang ““Mury”– the international protest anthem about taking down the prison walls This song of the Catalan resistance came to us from Poland and became famous in the Solidarity Movement.

13:35 - As many children, I visited the art school.

13:38 - But when I came to the director with the letter of resignation because I decided to study philology he said, “Right now you think you don’t want to be an artist, but you will see: you’ll be back in the business. ” And he was right! Because seven years ago, we gathered a small group of classmates and went to study art in the Czech Republic.

14:05 - I got a Masters Degree at Sutnarka in Plzeň.

14:08 - There, I studied graphics, illustration, and sculpture. Then, I received my second degree in stage design and puppeteering at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts.

14:20 - Some years ago, we founded a theatre troupe, Sleď Pod Kožichem. This name roughly translates as “herring under a fur coat” or Селедка под шубой.

14:31 - It’s a Soviet-era dish that our parents served us at celebrations. Here you can see our puppets in action: Even though I don’t appear on stage very often, I usually work “backstage” creating stage design, puppets, masks, and costumes I guess you could still call me a real Czech puppeteer, as Sasha said in her introduction.

14:57 - I usually make our puppets myself. Wood and gold, stones and lighting are my favorite mediums. I love wood carving as much as embroidery. And, in general, I am fascinated by folk crafts. My grandmother was a “Jill of all trades. “ She could embroider, sew, knit, weave, etc.

15:19 - My mother can do a little less. In the picture, you can see a shirt that my mother made with elements of my grandmother’s embroidery. In our family, we have a joke that’s: all that was left for me was just embroidery. More than ten years ago, I explored that ornaments could be read as a kind of text. For a long time, women were not taught to read or write, so everything they saw was reflected in their craft, which became their form of expression.

Here, you can see a sample of how the codification of ornament language works.

16:01 - One of the first projects in which I used these prints was “The Book of the Bird Gamayun Song. ” I did a visual translation of this literary text into the language of ornaments. At the end of the book, there was a short glossary of symbols I used.

16:22 - Studying symbols was very exciting, but I realized that it was not the easiest way to tell the story because the reader has to know the ornament language.

16:33 - But I wanted to popularize the idea of storytelling through embroidery.

16:38 - The inspiration again came from the folk tradition, this time in more understandable pictograms. . These three pictures are from the book by Belarusian ethnographer Mikhail Katsar.

16:51 - This is how he describes the pictures: “As you know, the dove is a symbol of love. The three pictures show us three phases of a relationship: So, my next work, “Zhenokol,” (in English, I call it “FeminatuRe”) was an embroidered figurative comic strip on a dress, where the first and the last pictures are the same. Therefore, it’s called “Zhenokol” a woman in a circle.

17:23 - This is my fictional myth about how women are born.

17:27 - If you want, you can read the full comic on my Instagram page, rufinabazlova (all one word).

17:34 - So, the history of Belarusian Vyzhyvanka. Last summer, I graduated from the Theater Academy and decided to return to embroidery.

17:45 - At that moment, I was thinking about the topic of femininity, but, at the same time, the political events regarding to Belarusian elections surrounded me from everywhere. And I made my first sketches on graph paper.

18:05 - Of course, embroidery is an important part of Belarusian culture, tradition, and its code. My white and red motifs come from our folk culture. The events that are taking place now, after all, can be seen as the formation of the nation. Living abroad, I have been trying to assimilate as much as possible.

18:27 - Sometimes, I’ve even asked myself, “Who am I more: Belarusian or Czech?” However, with the beginning of the protests in Belarus, a clear understanding of my roots came to me: emotionally, I am still connected to Belarus.

18:42 - I followed the news, and something in me resonated with the people in Belarus. I felt angry about the lack of justice there. And in the end, I channeled my feelings into this series, the “History of Belarusian Vyzhyvanka. ” There is a funny story about the name. In Belarusian, there is a special name for an embroidered shirt, “vyshyvanka. ” In August, I was interviewed by a German journalist. She asked me, “How big a role does the vyshyvanka play for the Belarusian people?” She spoke Russian very well, but because of a little accent, the word vySHyvanka sounded like vyZHyvanka.

So the word took on a new meaning. In Belarusian, the word vyzhyvat’ means “to survive. ” And vyZHyvanka was a new noun form of that verb. So, the only one answer I had was: “Yes, it plays a very important role, because surviving is what my people are doing right now. ” The stories that I picked to cover were based on my reactions to the situation. Since the beginning of the protests, I’ve been posting my work on Instagram.

What you see here are vector graphics. Then, some of the works were embroidered. Some of them exist in limited editions of signed and numbered silkscreen prints. But I haven’t managed to depict everything.

20:15 - Like the revolution, my pieces are still works in progress. Now, I would like to show you some of my art works and comment on them. Almost everything I know about the events in Belarus, I find on the internet.

20:30 - Very often, inspiration comes from viral videos and pictures. For example, this comic strip is about Nina Baginskaya.

20:37 - Nina is 73 years old, and Belarusians call her the Grandmother of the Belarusian Revolution. She walks everywhere carrying a handmade white-red-white flag and she’s afraid of nothing. When a police officer tried to stop her and take her flag, she kicked him and said that she was just walking. So, this comic strip is about a Yandex taxi. Back in October, one of the protesters was running from the police, and the driver saved him at the last second just like in the movies.

This video went viral too, and we all celebrated this little victory. The young man in the photo, as you can see, is the brave driver, 21-year-old student named Yevgenij. And he’s also originally from Grodno. This is an early work. It shows a specific situation on August 7, when Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was banned for holding a gathering. A pro-government event was planned in Kyiv Park in Minsk. Two DJs, Kiryl Galanau and Vlad Sakalou, disrupted the event by playing the song, “Changes,” by Soviet rockstar, Viktor Tsoi This song was banned in Belarus.

Then, the Square of Changes popped up nearby in a Minsk courtyard, where portraits of these DJs were painted on the side of a transformer box. The mural has been painted over more than ten times, but it reappears again and again and again.

22:22 - Then, Roman Bondarenko, the artist behind the Square of Changes, tragically died on November 11. Strangers in masks went to the neighborhood to take down the white-red-white protest ribbons. People tie them because it’s more difficult to take down ribbons than a single flag.

22:42 - When the artist went out to protect these ribbons, he was beaten, arrested, and died the next day in a hospital. Just imagine: he was murdered for ribbons. This was a terrible shock to Belarusians. When Roman died, the Square of Changes itself changed forever. And I made this image to honor Roman’s memory.

23:06 - Another popular motif in my work is a cockroach. Everyone in Belarus knows who this is. Everyone has read the fairytale by Soviet writer, Kornei Chukovsky, in which a cockroach oppresses all other animals and makes their lives miserable. In Summer 2020, popular blogger, Sergei Tikhanovsky, started a campaign that he called “Stop the Cockroach. ” Thousands of people took to the street carrying slippers and making the gesture of smashing the cockroach.

Sergei Tikhanovsky was arrested very soon, and his wife, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, decided to run in his place.

23:55 - If you’re familiar with Chukovsky’s text, then you might also know that at the end, the cockroach is eaten by a bird. In my works, a bird is a funny character that sometimes finds itself in ridiculous situations. For example, there is a bird being chased by a riot police just because it wanted to eat a bug, which is actually natural for birds. So, this illustrates the absurdity happening in our country. In another work, titled “Go Away,” I wanted to show that in Belarus, not only the people, but even the flora and the fauna, turned away from Lukashenka.

In “Self-Care,” birds are just a symbol of peace. This illustration was inspired by peaceful gatherings of citizens in Brest and St. Petersburg under the pretext of “feeding the pigeons. ” While my people and my country are still surviving, I try to respond to current events as much as possible to support my people. While I don’t know what the spring will bring us, I continue to draw a better future for the Belarusians.

Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Rufina.

25:16 - That was fantastic, and I’m going to introduce our next speaker.

25:23 - Our next speaker, Nadzeya Norton, is joining us from the San Francisco Bay area. Nadzeya is an activist, ethnographer, social and cultural anthropologist, who was trained at Belarusian State University in Minsk and developed and taught the course on Belarusian History and Culture at Southwestern College in Kansas (the only center for the Belarusian studies in the US). Since 2016, Nadzeya has concentrated her efforts on promoting, preserving, and developing Belarusian culture, tradition, and history in California.

Since the beginning of the protests, Nadzeya has also emerged as one of the key organizers of the Belarusian diaspora, the leader of the Belarusians in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the organizer of the largest protest events on the West Coast I personally know Nadzeya as a thoughtful historian and ethnographer.

26:24 - And this is my question for you, Nadzeya: What can you tell us about the ritual meanings and uses of textiles in traditional Belarusian culture? Sasha, thank you for the special introduction.

26:37 - Hi, everybody! Embroidery pattern is a marker of Belarusian national belonging.

26:43 - Embroidery first appeared in neolithic times. Weaving in traditional Belarusian culture was considered to be women’s work, while embroidery was reserved albeit not exclusively to the unmarried girls. The Belarusian traditional towels have a ritual, ceremonial, and decorative function.

27:07 - All in all, there are many names for these towels, and the name varies by the specific use. And the embroidery patterns vary from region to region in Belarus.

27:18 - Abydzennik, which was described in Volha Labacheuskaya’s article (who is ethnographer, social anthropologist, which I happened to work together in a very interesting project about Belarus and its neighbors, and that’s how we’ve met, which was organized by the Warsaw University). The symbolic idea of God’s beneficences is probably embodied in the greatest degree in the tradition of abydzennik People appealed to the tradition of the joint-making of clothes or towels from the very beginning.

For example, from thread spinning to the end product of weaving, with a goal to ward off disease from the village to save the harvest from a drought, and in other circumstances dangerous for people. The last cases of making everyday clothes in Belarus were stated by ethnographers during World War Two when women tried to protect their villages from soldiers with the help of this ancient custom.

Everyday cloth, newly made, embodies the symbolic idea of the first-born purity and kindness.

28:38 - It’s able to spread its properties around to resist evil and sinful things, to change a dangerous course of life. One of the strategies for survival in everyday warfare was the everyday ritual.

28:54 - It involves making, from beginning to end (from spinning thread to weaving on a loom), a daily towel, abydzennik. And then, as a ritual, walking around the village with it, placing it in separate walkways, churches, and specially-placed everyday crosses. All operations must be performed during the ritual time: one day –– from sunrise to sunset or one night –– from sunset to sunrise.

Belarusian people laid their everyday cloth across the road and drove animals across in order that they should not fall ill. They laid it across the street to prevent the spread of disease, they held it above their heads, and all inhabitants of the village passed under it. People also hung it on crosses as a sacrifice to the church. Magic actions with the everyday towel and their contributions to the church are the evidence that furnishes folk beliefs in the capability of those to change the broken world order and influence humankind’s fate.

At the same time, the main initiators of these rituals were women. Women decided. And this team, consisting of representatives of the village known for ritual practices, were older women.

30:23 - And the most important part of the ritual –– the collective production of sacred fabric that was performed exclusively by women – suggests that we are probably dealing with the old Belarusian ritual of renewal and cleansing the world. So, now I’d like to transfer to nowadays and quote the conclusions which Elena Gapova, the professor of sociology from the Western Michigan University, came to in her very interesting article “Things to Have for a Belarusian: Rebranding the Nation via Online Participation.

” This paper focuses on the practice of consumption and online manipulation with Belarusian vyshyvanka, a distinctly ethnic national product. Professor Gapova comes to a conclusion, which I would like to quote: “The embroidered shirts, also known as vyshyvanka, and a variety of ornamented products in their online incarnations, represent a saturated semiotic space, where ideas about nationhood are packaged.

At the same time, as online communities reinvent the meaning and socially reinforce the use of vyshyvanka as a ‘national’ product, they recreate their group solidarity and social cohesion. The mechanics of this integration relies on the ability of some digital units to serve as memes and pointers with the help of which users and consumers can find and become aware of each other” End of quote.

32:04 - In the end, I cannot help but see or draw the parallel between these old rituals of making a textile and the events of the Belarusian revolution, which started in August 2020, where hundreds of thousands of people, mainly in Belarus, but also all around the world, started to produce, to sew the white-red-white flags, most of them are handmade.

32:37 - And we, as the Belarusians, covered the whole planet, I can tell, with it.

32:43 - So this way, we confirmed our strategy of survival and protection, and I am sure that we are going to win.

32:53 - This protest has been going on for 200 days already, which is very impressive and demonstrates the bond of times and generations.

33:03 - Long Live Belarus! and thank you! Thank you so much, Nadzeya! And for those of you, who like me, experienced some digital interference, I would like to mention that on the exhibition website, in the curated tour section, there is a link to Elena Gapova’s article, which you can check out yourself.

33:25 - There is definitely so much more to be done on embroideries and textiles in Belarus. It is an emerging field, which will be developed rapidly – as I think it will it be.

33:37 - Now, I’d like to introduce our next speaker.

33:39 - Our next speaker, Antonina Stebur, is joining us from Moscow, where it is past midnight, so thank you so much, Antonina, for doing this for us! Antonina is a Minsk- and Moscow-based curator and researcher. She studied visual and cultural studies at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania and at the School of Engaged Art with the group Chto Delat? (What is to be done?) in St.

Petersburg, Russia. And I have a great story because you’re in my own struggle, as a graduate student.

34:12 - I have thought for so many times I should quit everything and I should go and study with ??, Street Actionism.

34:19 - That was my secret dream escape. So, Antonina is, in fact, a member of several art groups and I am going to list them.

34:27 - The first one has a very curious title: #damaudobnayavbytu (Woman convenient in everyday life), which examines feminism in the Belarusian and also post-Soviet context The second group is called AGITATSIA.

34:43 - It is a research group dedicated to political performance art practices, actionism and art activism. Antonina has curated several important exhibitions in Belarus, Russia, Poland, France, and China. Together with Anna Samarskaya, she authored the book, “The History of Belarusian Photography,” which came out in 2019.

35:05 - Her research areas and curatorial interests include community, the re-composition of everyday practices, feminist critique, a new sensibility, grassroots initiatives, post-Soviet political art, performance, and art-activism. So, I met Antonina first through her text and in a wonderful discussion, which was published by Krapiva (and I’ve inserted a link in the chat for those of you who can read Russian).

35:33 - Antonina, you spoke about how during the protests, art tends to become illustrative and loses some of its complexity.

35:42 - I’m curious, how do you see Rufina’s work in the context of contemporary Belarusian art, especially art made by women? And, perhaps, also you could tell us a little bit about the large exhibition of Belarusian protest art that you are a part of, which will be opening in Kyiv ??? very soon.

36:01 - Thank you. Good afternoon. Yes, and good evening for me.

36:04 - I’d like to clarify one thing: I didn’t mean that art, in general, I talked about the curated approach and how people make exhibition because the majority of them use art as illustration for the protests. I think that due to this, they lose the complexity of art, and of course, as a curator and critic, it is very sensitive for me.

36:31 - When we speak about contemporary art, it’s much more complex and so it can be more functional that it only be a simple illustration.

36:43 - As for me, Rufina’s project, the History of Belarusian Vyshyvanka, is the great example of how contemporary art can be complex, and how we can read contemporary art in several levels or in different ways.

37:03 - And, as for me, how to say? We can investigate or we can read or we can view these in several, several levels, as I told.

37:15 - For the first, we can just see the surface, visual surface.

37:19 - And Rufina told us she works with national ancient handicraft technique, Vyzhyvanka, like a cross-stitch – something like that.

37:34 - And, in the past, women created the whole story or different ornaments due to this method.

37:43 - And, of course, when we see Rufina’s posters or embroideries, we can see their different scenes or different very important events about Belarusian protests.

37:57 - It’s very interesting, but I think that it’s only surface and we can move further and, of course, we can interpret her works in completely different ways.

38:10 - For example, we can mention that the method of cross-stich or the method of Vyzhyvanka because these crosses coming together is a good metaphor of the chains of solidarity or the network of solidarity is a very important, how do you say, is a very important political action in Belarus because on the 12th of August, beginning with women, and after that, (I think) that all groups all different professional groups of our country became this chain of solidarity.

38:49 - And, of course, crosses getting together is a good metaphor of that, is a good metaphor of solidarity.

38:57 - And, of course, the method as a tee become political statement, will become a political message.

39:05 - And we can also notice that embroidery as a method is also not very snobbish.

39:13 - It means that in art, in classical art hierarchy, it’s not on the top because the majority of classical art critics even count it as a art – just craft.

39:26 - In Classical museum, we cannot see the example of embroideries as a masterpiece – only as a example of an anthropological point of view of our culture or when we speak about culture – but not when we speak about art.

39:44 - And it’s also very important. Moreover, as Rufina said and Nadzeya said also, that the majority of Vyzhyvanka was made by illiterate women, who couldn’t read or write.

40:00 - And, of course, it is very important because, due to this, they had an opportunity to sign their work.

40:08 - And, of course, so they were excluded from the “big” Belarusian history narrative.

40:17 - And we can compare these exclusionary process with the protestors because today the majority of Belarusian people are excluded from the political from the official political all the normal political processes And of course, when we read the idea or proposal how our government want to change the Constitution or for example to those people who behave not in a “proper” way to lose their civil rights It sounds horrible.

40:52 - So, we also can compare with that And of course we can mention, and of course Nadzeya and Rufina also mentioned it, that Vyzhyvanka is a collective process.

41:08 - Women put together twelve different stories, sing different songs and so on.

41:16 - So, it’s collective. And in this point of view, I think that revolution or protests cannot be individual efforts.

41:26 - It’s also a collective idea. So, it’s also a very important thing.

41:32 - And of course, it is obvious that we can read Rufina’s work from this point of view.

41:39 - Of course, Rufina gives voices, due to this method, she gives voices to many, many people, and to reinterpret our history in a completely different way or in a completely different method.

41:55 - And finally, we can understand her work, when we compare embroideries as a method or as a process with programming or IT – International information technology because we know that cyber feminists said that their first example of programming wasn’t like, it wasn’t IBM or something like that.

42:21 - The first example of programming was weaving and embroidery because it’s very close to each other.

42:29 - We know that in Belarusian protests, IT plaid a significant role.

42:35 - So, I think that it’s also a good idea to reflect how we can understand the ancient – or not modern – method of embroidery with a very innovative sphere and I think that it’s really, really interesting.

42:54 - And, of course, Rufina is one of the participants in our exhibition.

42:59 - I don’t know what to say about our exhibition.

43:03 - I am only one of six curators. It will be huge exhibition about, not only about today’s protest art.

43:10 - We will show a lot of work. In our exhibition, will take part more than 50 artists in different gender, different generation, different approach and so on.

43:27 - The name of our exhibition will be: kožny dzień.

43:31 - It means “everyday. ” It’s a very important motto of these protests because people get together and talk to each other everyday.

43:45 - It means that tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, they will return and the protests never end.

43:52 - So, this metaphor and this motto is very important, will be key metaphor of our exhibition because we completely understand that we can say or we can analyze the start of our protests from the 80s, like a permanent protest, like a permanent revolution from older days.

44:21 - We also can say that our protests will never end.

44:26 - Thank you. Thank you so much, Antonina.

44:30 - This is fascinating and we actually have agreed continuity between our speakers.

44:35 - It is my honor to present Alisa Lozhkina, an independent Ukrainian curator, art historian, and critic currently joining us from San Francisco Bay area. In 2010–2016, Alisa was the editor-in-chief of the major Ukrainian art magazine, Art Ukraine. In 2013–2016, she also served as the deputy director of Mystetskyi Arsenal (where the exhibition will take place for the Belarusians) and she has also organized seven large-scale international exhibitions of contemporary art, including “Permanent Revolution: Ukrainian Art Now” at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, which was nominated for the Global Fine Art Award as one of the best museum exhibitions of the post-war and contemporary art back in 2018.

Additionally, Alisa is the author of two books: “Point Zero: The Newest History of Ukrainian Contemporary Art,” (which she co-authored with Oleksandr Solovyov in 2010) and “Permanent Revolution: Art in Ukraine, the 20th to the Early 21st Century,” which she published in Ukrainian, French, and, most recently, English. And I am proud to have my own desk copy here.

45:52 - Alisa is currently an ABD in comparative history at Central European University in Vienna, Budapest, where she is writing her dissertation on the interconnections of art and revolutions in recent Ukrainian history.

46:08 - And I do have a question for Alisa: Alisa, Ukrainian protest art has already gone through several cycles of revolutions evolving and transforming itself every time.

46:21 - And you’ve played a key role in shaping and developing its narratives as a curator, critic, and historian. What is your view of Belarusian protest art? And could you compare the medium of embroidery in contemporary Belarusian art to what is happening in Ukraine? Thank you.

46:39 - Thank you, Sasha for this introduction, and it’s my great pleasure to be a part of this panel.

46:45 - I feel really sorry actually that the background is such sad events in Belarusia, and I wish we had a better, you know, reason to be together.

47:01 - But I wanted to mention one thing: that, yes, now it looks very bad and I hope that it gets better and I hope that protests really bring some results and maybe spring and in new year, things will change.

47:19 - But I want to encourage you and to say that Ukrainian experience, actually, it tells us that Charles Dickens, when he spoke about the best of times and the worst of times in his “A Tale of Two Cities,” was right because when we are going through such tremendous social turbulences as the ones that you have now in your country, a huge artistic upheaval happens and a huge change of aesthetics, and a huge mobilization of artists, which I already see in Belarusia.

47:58 - And I see that there is a huge interest towards your art, your culture, and your history in general, which might bring a lot of long-term results no matter how awful your cockroach is.

48:14 - And I really wish that this will be the outcome of all these events, that the world, the international community will see your bright culture, your amazing women, who are fighting for their rights together with their men and things will change better.

48:32 - And speaking about the comparisons, in my opinion, there are more similarities than differences in the protest art of Ukrainian Revolution of 2014 and current Belarusian events. I think the reason of this similarity is obvious.

48:46 - Both protests, as well as other mass movements, such as recent events in Hong Kong, and Russia and the United States as well, are the product of contemporary society, where social media plays a key role.

48:58 - So, we all live in the society of spectacle, as French author, Guy Debord, once said.

49:03 - And the rules of the spectacle are pretty much the same everywhere.

49:08 - Protestors all over the world use the same channels of communication and this results in very similar aesthetics and similar patterns of behavior.

49:16 - Performance is poster art, viral photos and videos – these are universal tools of contemporary protest expression.

49:23 - To give an example: it’s a funny story because I exhibited an artwork (and it was actually a documentation of civil protests in several exhibitions that I curated) and it was a documentation of a situation – which was organized in 2014 in Kyiv by civil activists near the administrational President, Viktor Yanukovych, at that time – and a group of women brought mirrors and put them in front of a long line of policemen, who were guarding the building.

49:55 - The idea was to remind the policemen that they would be unable to look at their reflections in the mirror without shame after all of the brutalities against civilians in which they were involved.

50:08 - And as I told, this was shown in several exhibitions and I saw that everybody knew that it was Ukrainian footage.

50:16 - But, I think, one week – or maybe two weeks ago – I noticed this photograph began circulating in Russian media, in Russian social media, as the footage of recent Russian protests in Moscow, and my friends – journalists and the curators – and everybody was absolutely sure that this was actual footage of Russian protests.

50:41 - And it took me a while to convince them that it was something that was already done seven years ago, in Ukraine.

50:49 - I mean that there there are a lot of similarities and sometimes if these contexts are culturally close it’s very easy to mix where, what is happening.

51:04 - And speaking about Rufina’s art project, it is extremely interesting how she manages to combine contemporary “screen-sinking,” which was already mentioned here.

51:12 - So she creates her works in the computer, she posts them on Instagram.

51:16 - which is another characteristic feature of contemporary mass movements, which is very interesting for me as well.

51:22 - The re-actualization of very deep historical patterns, old symbols, folk elements, and so on.

51:29 - In Ukraine, we had a very similar revival of interest towards folk music, old historic events, and, of course, traditional embroidered clothes during our revolution in 2014.

51:39 - The same happened in 2004 because we are like repeated revolutionaries.

51:45 - We have a habit of having revolutions in our country.

51:50 - So, the sudden urge to return to the roots typically doesn’t last for long and is followed by the opposite trend: rejection of folk style and suspicious attitude towards nationalism in general.

52:01 - This return to “normality,” if we can call it this way, coincides usually with fatigue from protests – which we sometimes call the “post-revolutionary hangover. ” It is relatively easy to explain this interest to the past, using the methodology of political science.

52:17 - A nation is being built for revolutionary transformation, and a quest for identity is obviously a key part of this process.

52:25 - But I also think that this interest stores our roots and re-actualization of circle archetypal symbols has something to do with the nature of mass mobilization and the altered state of mass consciousness it brings.

52:38 - During the revolution, especially if you’re actively participating in the events or following them on social media, for a brief period of time people experience like very specific states of consciousness.

52:50 - I’m not a specialist in this field and don’t dare to judge it, but as a person, who has already witnessed two such events, I can prove that, yes.

52:58 - There is something extremely unusual in the whole fabric of reality during such events, and suddenly you look at some boring stuff, which you hated since you studied at school – such as folk symbols, for example, old patriotic poetry and things like that – and see them in a completely different light.

53:14 - Same happened with embroidery and folk aesthetics, for example.

53:18 - I don’t know about Belarus, but in Ukraine it has very ambiguous connotations I mean, embroidery in general because in the Soviet Union, so-called Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism was officially prosecuted, and at the same time, folk Ukrainian culture was supported by the State.

53:37 - Why did it happen? Because Ukrainian culture was intentionally presented as rural.

53:42 - The only thing Ukrainians were allowed to do in their own language was to sing folk songs, dress in exaggeratedly folk costumes, and dance folk dances.

53:51 - This “high-culture,” science, and so-on was predominantly Russian. This created the stereotype that Ukrainians were those rural people in embroidered dresses. Funnily enough, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, new leaders of independent Ukraine did their best to support the same stereotype. But now, they were wearing folk-embroidered costumes as a sign of their protest against Soviet imperialism. To make a long story short, before revolutions in both 2004 and in 2014, embroidery, to be honest, was not very fashionable among young people.

But then suddenly, in the revolutionary turmoil, everything changes.

54:32 - I’m still impressed by this switch, and I think it is one of the most important things in Rufina’s art – that it reflects this mood of social transformation and this brief moment in history, when old symbols become so relevant and start speaking to people’s hearts.

54:48 - In general, I think that contemporary revolutions are the times, when not only old symbols and practices but also contemporary art, in general, re-actualizes.

54:58 - These are brief and priceless moments, when art comes out of white cubes and to the streets, when artists can feel extremely high social demand for their art.

55:08 - And this sincerity makes contemporary protest art one of the most interesting phenomena – at least for me as a curator and a researcher.

55:18 - I also want to stress one thing which Sasha mentioned at the beginning of her speech because it is really extremely important to archive protest art, not only protest art – actually all contemporary art, in general because I don’t know about Belarus, but I have a feeling you guys are in the same situation as we are in Ukraine because we have this very huge problem because whole decades and whole parts of our recent art history remain undocumented and not archived.

So, we used to think that the internet remembers everything but unfortunately it doesn’t. the footage gets lost very fast, websites no longer exist, information which yesterday seemed so accessible simply disappears So, I really encourage you to document as much you can of your protest art today, not to lose it for tomorrow.

56:12 - Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Alisa for this perfect wrap-up of this webinar.

56:19 - I think that Alisa’s point about archiving, not just protest art – but art – is a perfect summary of today’s webinar.

56:27 - And I would like to give a huge shout-out to all our librarians, who work in this field day and night, building databases, building archives and being the invisible superheroes making the unstable digital environment stable, and bringing little bit of order into our lives.

56:48 - Thank you for hosting with us today. Thank you for providing a platform for Rufina’s exhibit, and I would like to introduce Jennifer Osorio from UCLA’s Library, who will give us the concluding remarks.

57:01 - Thank you. Thank you, Sasha. Hi, everybody! I’m going to be very quick.

57:06 - I just wanted to thank everyone for participating in today’s webinar, and particularly our speakers, and Sasha, our curator and Alena Aissing, who is UCLA’s Librarian for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the many UCLA staff and students, who assisted with bringing us all together.

57:22 - Our Department, International & Area Studies, supports the global mission of UCLA by building collections and communities – both locally and from around the world – that represent the diversity of our faculty, and students, research and teaching.

57:34 - So, we work with researchers to create new knowledge, improve access to resources and further ideas that both explore and improve our understandings of regions, peoples, and cultures.

57:44 - Today’s session is a great example of the kind of outreach we conduct to support expression through various art forms by students and faculty at UCLA, often against violence and repression around the world.

57:53 - I want to thank you for giving us an hour of your time today, and I hope to see you at future events.

57:58 - Thank you. Goodbye. .