Do not crown us with legends, 2026

art object (webbing, hand embroidery), installation, performance

The project proposes an alternative form of remembrance of the suppressed memory of Kurapaty – a site of mass Soviet executions during the 1930-1940s. It uses a vernacular language of material and ritual depth to counter hollow monumentality.

The central element of the work is a belt, which in Belarusian tradition symbolized the border between worlds and was used in transitional rituals, as well as practices of honoring and protection through encircling sacred places. Embroidered onto the belt are quotes from archival materials and findings, significant dates, numbers, symbolic images, and lines by executed poets. The fragmented nature of these testimonies emphasizes the erasure of Belarusian historical memory. The black ribbon references the grassroots civic movement to expose silenced tragedies, marking the site of a crime and making the hidden and unacknowledged visible. In this sense, the belt ceases to be just an artistic element and begins to function as a witness-object — a ta material carrier of the presence of the victims. At the same time, it becomes an apotropaion within the performance, where the very gesture of encircling acts as a final gesture of remembrance and symbolically completes the transition that never took place.

The project was made at the Mochnarte residency in the framework of “Clinton’s Bench” project curated my Uladzimir Hramovich.