Belarusian portrait

“Belarusian Opposition Artists in Kyiv” is the name of an art exhibit featuring paintings banned in Belarus and now being shown in public for the first time at the Center for Ukraine-Belarus Cooperation in Kyiv. Noted Belarusian writers, such as Genadz Drozdov, Ales Pushkin, Aliaksei Marachkin, and Serzhuk Tsimokhov submitted 21 paintings featuring a variety of styles. Pushkin (on photo), for example, brought his series of 12 paintings called “Belarusian Renaissance,” which includes portraits of noted participants of Belarus’s national-liberation movement. The artist says that in his home country his paintings do not correspond to the officially established concept of national history. Pushkin says that all his requests to state-run museum to exhibit his paintings are always turned down. Protests against the resolution passed by the National Art Museum of Belarus ended with clashes with the militia, arrests, impoundment, and destruction of canvases. In 1989 Pushkin received a two-year suspended sentence for taking part in a banned rally to commemorate the Day of Freedom. In July of this year, while he was staging one of his art performances in Minsk and displaying his paintings on the stairs leading to the National Art Museum, he was dubbed “an SS member” and forbidden to leave Belarus. The artists say that the situation is going from bad to worse. He and his fellow artists are in the middle of being expelled from the premises that they have occupied for the past decade. Nevertheless, they are happy that some books are being published and circulated. “What can be better than people viewing their national heroes and wondering why they never knew them before?” says Pushkin.