katsiaryna-sheliahovich.gleamstudio.xyz

DICTATORLAND series of works ViaFarini 2025

Series of sculptural works which explores the psychological and political dimensions of displacement, memory, and resistance through material-based storytelling. Drawing on personal experiences of migration and the silent trauma of exile, KS installations give form to complex emotional landscapes shaped by authoritarianism and protest.

Glotal loop

Cradle for coils

FWU

Ametista axis

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Soft Entry Simulation. The work references a children’s game — hopscotch — reimagined in a space where playfulness is no longer safe. Made with transparent tape directly on the floor, it carries a delicate, almost ghost-like presence. The softness of the material contrasts with the weight of the subject: the slow, nearly invisible transition from a semi-democratic country to a dictatorship.

In Glotal Loop reworks a Soviet-era sink with chains, a rotating motor, and sound. The installation captures the resonance of a silenced lament — a sound that never fully arrives. It becomes a sculptural expression of grief for a lost homeland and a voice held back.

Cradle for Coils continues this thread with aluminum and volcanic stones, suggesting both fragility and resistance. After taking a public stance against Lukashenko and Putin, the artist accepted that she could no longer return to Belarus. The work reflects the dual reality of needing to speak out and fearing the impact such actions may have on loved ones still inside the regime.

FWU reuses plastic, dried flowers, and aluminum to reference the 2020 Belarusian protests, where women carried flowers in defiance of violence. These symbolic gestures — beautiful but doomed — are reimagined here as objects that balance between mourning and transformation. The work is exhibited together with real dried flowers, serving as a fragile yet persistent memory of those events. At the same time, Sheliahovich draws parallels to BDSM practices — referencing systems of control, submission, and resistance — subtly linking personal agency and collective dominance.

Amethysta Axis. This sculptural work emerges from the emotional landscape of the Belarusian protests of 2020, when thousands of women took to the streets holding flowers as symbols of peace and resistance. What followed was brutal repression — a moment of collective hope that was violently crushed. The trauma of that time, both personal and national, continues to resonate, especially for those of us who can no longer return home.

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