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eng Translation Pending Review

Requiem for a New Year

Jura Shust January 10 – February 2, 2014
Gallery of Contemporary Art "Ў", Minsk

Selected artworks

We exist from event to event, from holiday to holiday. The dark matter lays between, usually called daily life, and cannot linger in our memory because of its amorphous form and runs through our fingers. Repetition, as the main principle of daily life, like a hypnotic pendulum, immerses us into the trance of existence and dissolves us in the time flow. New Year's celebration has a liminal nature, like an orgasm, it is marked by fireworks and impregnates a collective body with a new life.

The New Year celebration is the most important mass holiday in the post-soviet region of today. The feast, which derives from pagan roots, still fulfills a social function, as it blends the public and the private, transforming the nation into a big family, just like it did hundreds of years ago. Looping the year cycle, New Year is a triumph of the calendar, and as a result, it is a statement of daily order and discipline. This is why, probably, the holiday has such a powerful tradition of celebration and very intense magical connotations, that passed through the filter of soviet secularisation.

The main holiday’s symbol, the fir-tree, refers to the myth of the World Tree. In worldwide mythology, being an object of worship, the tree played an important role of mediator with a parallel world. This is particularly why, people decorate Christmas tree branches nowadays, reviving an ancient sacrifice ritual.


The core video of the project depicts a symbolic procession through the artist's hometown. The place, as if after

a coma, slowly comes back to life 10 days after the New Year celebration, on the day that is marked by another symbolic notion - The Old New Year...