A Brave New World
2019-2022
as part of the STATUS Project (Belarus & Sweden), 2022
“...We Will Build a Brave New World.
On the Status and the Working
Conditions of an Artist in Belarus”
The series A Brave New World was first published as a set of illustrations that accompanied Tania Arcimovich’s essay “We Will Build a Brave New World. On the Status and the Working Conditions of an Artist in Belarus” on the Status Research Platform in 2019.
Sviatahor’s vivid socio-fantastic images reflect on the artist’s anxiety-fueled liminal position in the contemporary post-Soviet Belarusian labor market. Stuck in the dialectic of artmaking as neoliberal production (work) versus Soviet-typed ideological or dissident vocation (non-work), many of the artists are forced to endure radical financial instability, debasing work conditions, and disorienting socio-economic relations.
Sviatahor’s vivid socio-fantastic images reflect on the artist’s anxiety-fueled liminal position in the contemporary post-Soviet Belarusian labor market. Stuck in the dialectic of artmaking as neoliberal production (work) versus Soviet-typed ideological or dissident vocation (non-work), many of the artists are forced to endure radical financial instability, debasing work conditions, and disorienting socio-economic relations.
For Sviatahor, this existential crisis becomes the creative source which inspires her to imagine a brave new world in which artists might define their own place and status in society.
Words by Aniko Szucs
Words by Aniko Szucs