Belarus: Photography, Art, and the Faces of Resistance

Exhibit Dates: June 24 – September 1, 2022
Exhibit Location: The Joseph Regenstein Library, 2nd Floor Exhibit Cases, 1100 East 57th Street, Chicago, IL

Protest with red and white flag
Photo of protest by Dmitry Dmitryev

In May 2020, in the run up to the Belarusian presidential election, protests erupted that continued for ten months. These protests centered around opposition to Alexander Lukashenko's bid for a sixth term as president and the jailing and maltreatment of opposition figures. The wife of one of these figures, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, registered as a candidate and declared election fraud following Lukahsenko's claim to have won with 80% of the vote.

An associated exhibition, Belarus: Faces of Resistance, hosted at Southspace Creative (1109 E 55th St, Chicago) and sponsored by the University of Chicago's Center for East European and Russian/Eurasia Studies, explores these events through the work of nine artists, photojournalists, and filmmakers. The Southspace exhibition will open to the public on June 24, 2022.

The two-case exhibit at Regenstein highlights materials from the University of Chicago Library meant to provide further context. The first case provides a brief timeline of protests and demonstrations in Belarus and highlights materials to provide context on the circumstances leading up to the 2020 demonstrations and of opposition movements in Belarus. The second focuses on the artistic and social context, highlighting art-activism, photography, and the context for how these demonstrations played out and how opposition continues to play out in Belarus through artistic means.

Curator

Megan Browndorf, Slavic and East European Studies Librarian, The University of Chicago Library

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