There is an epistemological gesture, before any aesthetic one, in crossing the threshold of the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista to visit Official. Unofficial. Belarus. The choice of this location — a millennium-old Benedictine basilica in the sestiere of San Polo, built in the ninth century and layered with centuries of devotion, ecclesiastical power, and anonymous deaths — is not decorative. It is a declaration: sacred space as the last remaining residue of sovereignty when the State has appropriated everything else.
Belarus Free Theatre, a collective founded in Minsk in 2005 and in exile since 2011 — later forced into total diaspora in 2020, after protests against Lukashenko's manipulated election results triggered a brutal crackdown — arrives at the Biennale not as a nation but as an autonomous cultural body. This is the fifth time Belarus has appeared in the lagoon, and the first time without a state mandate. In this paradox lies the conceptual core of the exhibition: is there anything more official than what the State has failed to censor?
The Body of Space, the Space of the Body
To enter the church is to enter a zone of temporal suspension that curators Daniella Kaliada and Natalia Kaliada MBE describe as a twilight zone between spiritual tradition and a totalitarian present. The phrase is precise to the bone. Because here the darkness is not metaphor: it is architectural matter, it is the smell of ancient stone and layered incense, it is the acoustic resonance of a building that has held prayers and forced silences in equal measure.
The walls receive the site-specific paintings of Sergey Grinevich, conceived and arranged like altarpieces. But religious iconography here undergoes a contemporary twist: the figures take on an ambiguity that belongs to the age of digital surveillance, where the omniscient gaze of God has been displaced — or perhaps simply updated — by that of the State. There is a disturbing continuity between the theological panopticism and the political panopticism that Foucault had already intuited in Discipline and Punish: power need not always be visible, so long as one knows it could be. Grinevich paints that potentiality. He paints the anxiety of being seen, watched, judged.
In the same space, the organ responds. Sounds of Silence by Olga Podgayskaya is a sound installation that oscillates between crescendos and reverberating silences, built around the liturgical instrument par excellence — the one that for centuries has marked the time of the sacred — transformed into a vehicle for saying what cannot be said. Silence here is not absence: it is the form language takes when speech is forbidden. It is the silence of the samizdat, of the clandestine gatherings in private apartments in Minsk where BFT held its first unannounced, unpublicised, unauthorised performances.
The Sphere as a Geology of Censorship
At the centre of the exhibition, a sphere nearly two and a half metres in diameter absorbs the gaze with the silent gravity of a dead planet. It was conceived by Nicolai Khalezin, co-founder of the theatre: banned books from Belarus, compacted and crushed by a bulldozer claw. The gesture is as brutal as it is precise. This is not a memorial: it is a phenomenology of power applied to the printed page. Each volume is a thought the State deemed incompatible with its own survival, and the machine — the bulldozer, instrument of urban planning and of war — has done what totalitarian ideologies do with ideas: rendered them unrecognisable in form, yet paradoxically immovable in substance. The sphere exists. It weighs. It occupies space. It refuses to disappear.
There is something profoundly Kafkaesque in this sculpture: not the Kafka of the grotesque, but that of the trial without a crime, of guilt without an articulable offence. The books are guilty of existing.
The Cemetery, the Confessionals, the Voices of the Invisible
In the private cemetery adjacent to the church — one of those Venetian spaces that seem removed from ordinary time, suspended between stone and sky — the sound installation reaches its most unsettling dimension. Audio recordings of testimonies from recently released Belarusian political prisoners fill the air among the gravestones. To protect their anonymity — because the danger does not cease with release, nor with exile — the voices are not those of the people concerned but of well-known actors: Gillian Anderson, Sir Stephen Fry, Jude Law (BFT trustee), Dame Joanna Lumley, Ruth Wilson. Familiar voices, reassuring by cultural association, carrying within themselves experiences that do not belong to them.
This substitution is not a technical device: it is a radical philosophical move on the nature of identity under totalitarian pressure. Who speaks when one cannot speak in one's own name? Who bears witness when witnessing means taking a risk? The voice becomes a loan, a gesture of solidarity, a form of complicity in the noblest and most precise sense of the term: complicit, one who bends together, who shares the risk. And we, listening in that cemetery, become part of this chain.
The confessional as a relational structure — the one who speaks, the one who listens in shadow, the third who will never know — runs through the entire sensory logic of the exhibition. The church itself is an enormous confessional. And what is confessed within it is not individual sin but the collective guilt of silence, of distance, of the ease with which one inhabits freedom without ever questioning it, of surveillance and of cataloguing.
Tsesler: the Spider as an Architecture of Constriction
The large metal sculptures by Vladimir Tsesler (born 1951 in Slutsk) that punctuate the cemetery space are built from prison bars, reshaped until they assume the form of the Belarusian pajak — the straw spider, traditionally hung from the ceiling as a talisman of domestic balance. An object belonging to the imaginary of home, stability, and hearth, forged from the material of detention. The metamorphosis is programmatic: the boundary between protection and confinement is often a matter of perspective, of who holds the power to name one and the other.
Beside the sculptures, an installation of wheat — material of labour, ritual, and Belarusian craft — is arranged in the space in ordered, regulated, almost militarised forms. Wheat as normalised nature, as life reduced to a system. The familiarity of the organic material against the coldness of formal imposition produces a discomfort that requires no explanation: it is felt before it is understood.
Surveillance Crucifixion: Power as Iconostasis
Outside, on or near the church facade, the Surveillance Crucifixion conceived by Daniella and Natalia Kaliada closes the cycle with a visual synthesis of devastating clarity: a cross composed entirely of CCTV cameras. The symbol of redemption, of sacrifice, of the vertical gaze — God watching from above — coincides with the symbol of capillary surveillance, horizontal, algorithmically neutral and humanly merciless. This is not blasphemy: it is diagnosis. Because contemporary power has not abandoned theology; it has simply secularised it, distributed it, made it infrastructure.
That cross speaks to us too, visitors arriving from democracies that believe themselves immune. It speaks to the progressive erosion of public privacy across Europe, to the normalisation of facial recognition, to mass surveillance disguised as security. Belarus is not an isolated case: it is an extreme case, a prototype — as BFT itself has stated — of a drift that other latitudes are following at different speeds and with more presentable language.
The Paradox of Non-State Officiality
Official. Unofficial. Belarus. is the fifth Belarusian presence at the Biennale, and the first without a state pavilion. Yet it is paradoxically the most politically charged, because its very institutional structure is an act of resistance: applying as a Collateral Event — one among more than 400 applications — means submitting to the rules of an international institution in order to declare the existence of a culture the State would prefer erased. It is a use of the system against the system, with something of the Situationist tactic but also of Václav Havel's method: occupying available institutional spaces with content the institution would never have chosen.
Visibility, the curators note, is not a passive luxury: it is a form of power. For cultures forced to the periphery — to clandestinity, exile, and whisper — that visibility becomes a declaration of existence. We have not been erased. We are here. And we are official without the mandate of any State.
A Final Note on the Nose and the Skin
This is not an exhibition to be visited with the faculty of intellect alone. The smell of thousand-year-old stone, of the wood of the church stalls, of the metal of the outdoor sculptures, of wheat left open to the air — all of this constructs a sensory epistemology that bypasses the critical filter and reaches something more primary: the awareness of the body as the site of freedom and as the first theatre of its violation. When regimes repress, they begin with the body — its movement, its presence in public spaces, its voice. This exhibition restores to the body that centrality, transforming every one of the visitor's senses into an instrument of political understanding.
To leave the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista carrying that weight is not a side effect: it is the intention. The complicity we are offered — and that we accept, crossing that threshold — does not leave us innocent.
Official. Unofficial. Belarus. · Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista, San Polo 2454, Venice · belarusfreetheatre.com · Collateral Event · 61st International Art Exhibition · 9 May – 22 November 2026
