Portal:

kalektar.org

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• Belarusian art research platform and internet portal kalektar.org. Non-governmental cultural organization.

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Belarusian art research platform and internet portal kalektar.org. Non-governmental cultural organization.

The platform is a tool for archiving, analysis and popularization of contemporary Belarusian art. The project was founded primarily as a tool for creating and consistently filling an archive dedicated to Belarusian art of the last decades. The main tool of the platform is a portal with a magazine and an INDEX (encyclopedia). The platform aims to create a museum of contemporary Belarusian art in Belarus.

The KALEKTAR platform consolidates the efforts and experience of a large number of experts in the field of contemporary Belarusian art to create, analyze and publish archives of the local art scene, critically evaluate the Belarusian cultural system, and promote the statements of Belarusian women authors in the country and beyond.

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Main projects of the platform:

The KALEKTAR portal is a magazine about contemporary Belarusian art;

INDEX – a dynamic encyclopedia of contemporary Belarusian art (the key tool of the platform for constructing an archive);

ZBOR – a research resource on key artistic expressions in contemporary Belarusian art and a series of large-scale research exhibitions;

Optional Campaign Criticism (FAK) - a course of lectures on contemporary art for students of artistic educational institutions of Belarus.

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Main team:

Founders: Alyaksei Barysyonak, Siarhei Kirushchenko, Siarhei Shabokhin.

Head of the platform and general editor of the portal: Siarhei Shabokhin.

Development of a new version of the portal: Maxim Tyminko.

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Reasons for the emergence of the platform:

The platform was created primarily due to dissatisfaction with the situation in contemporary Belarusian art, as well as the relative invisibility of the experience of Belarusian art in the Eastern European and international context. By inertia, the official cultural policy of Belarus preserved the features of the Soviet period, borrowing the centralized vertical bureaucratic system of cultural management. On the one hand, the current political regime in the mid-1990s abolished or greatly complicated the activities of independent institutions (non-state galleries, foundations, associations), as well as criminalized foreign funding, which led to a long-term stagnation of the art system and the absence of an institute for the study of contemporary Belarusian art.. b conducted archival activities and promoted integration into the international artistic context. As a result, during the reassessment of the artistic experience of Eastern Europe in all major studies of the 1990s and 2000s, Belarus was practically excluded from the general archive, remaining a "white spot" on the map of Eastern European art. Although there are various official institutions in the country, their activities lack effective research and archival work in the field of current art and cannot withstand criticism.

After 2005, in the environment of independent culture, there are noticeable processes of activation and consolidation of the art community, which led to the opening of non-state institutions - galleries, publications, Internet portals, research and exhibitions. A large amount of material was collected, which requires the preservation and accumulation of accumulated information and experience to create an open archive of contemporary Belarusian art, not only to avoid the loss and oblivion of another period of art development, but also as an example of the fight against the arbitrariness of the official cultural policy. This is how the decision was made to create an independent research platform of modern Belarusian art KALEKTAR.

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Selected dates:

2014

The research platform of contemporary Belarusian art KALEKTAR was founded on the initiative of Syarhei Kirushchanka, Aleksei Barysyonka and Syarhei Shabokhin. In 2014, the artist Siarhei Kirushchenko published an article on the Art Aktivist portal, in which he invited the community to consider the idea of ​​creating a private museum of modern art M21. After a long discussion of the presented project with various experts, the artist Siarhei Shabokhin joined the development of the concept, with whom they rethought the expediency and timeliness of the proposal for the formation of the museum. As a result, the project underwent significant transformations towards research activities and the creation of an open archive, rather than a museum. It was decided to create an archive in the form of an open Internet resource, which was thought of as a work in progress – a site that is constantly being filled with archival information. In order to create the most diverse and extensive archive, there was a need to combine disparate strategies and sources of information. Together with the curator Alyaksei Borisenko, the artists developed the concept of a general project for the creation of the research platform KALEKTAR, which combines various initiatives and approaches to creating an archive.

March 30, 2015

The internet portal kalektar.org was developed by Sergey Shabokhin and the Hainter Active studio and was officially presented in Minsk.

2015

The KALEKTAR platform team prepared the ZBOR research project. This project presents 40 selected works of Belarusian artists created from the 1980s to 2014. All the selected works are among the key statements that determined to one degree or another the development of various directions of Belarusian contemporary art.

August 28 - October 8, 2015

The large-scale research exhibition "ZBOR. Constructing Archive" and the presentation of the KALEKTAR platform and the ZBOR project took place at the Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok. Curators: Siarhei Shabokhin and Siarhei Kirushchenko.

March 31 – May 6, 2016

The second exhibition-presentation took place in Kyiv in the spring of 2016 at the ISOLATION Foundation under the name "ZBOR. Movement of Belarusian Art". The curators changed, changing the exposition and methods of demonstrating the archives - they became Andrey Dureyka and Maksim Tyminko.

October 16 - November 30, 2018

Curators Andrey Dureyka and Maksim Tyminko held the third presentation of the large-scale ZBOR research and exhibition project called ZBOR in Progress at the Х contemporary art gallery in Minsk.

2020

A decision was made and a project to reorganize the platform and portal was launched with the support of platform partner Rönne Stiftung from Berlin.

September 1, 2021

The platform has temporarily moved to the Gray Mandorla Studio space in Poznań.

October 7 - November 3, 2021

The platform became the organizer of the international group exhibition "ODKSZTAŁCENIE / DEFORMATION / UNLEARNING" in the Domie space in Poznań. Curator group: Alyaksei Barysyonak, Vera Zalutskaya and Roman Tratsyuk.

November 20, 2021

The new website of the platform was officially presented. The artist Maxim Tyminko acted as the developer of the new portal, who reorganized the resource into a modern and easy-to-use database. The new portal was implemented thanks to the support of the Federal Foreign Office, Civil Society Cooperation and the Rönne Stiftung.

2022

The platform is establishing a residence for Belarusian cultural representatives in Poznań with the support of the Rönne Stiftung and the Domie space. This year, Olga Arkhipova and Alyaksei Luniov became the first residents.

September 28 - October 11, 2022

The platform organizes the group Belarusian-Polish-Ukrainian exhibition Coalition.

End of October

A new tool is programmed on the website of the platform: automatic translation into English, Belarusian and Russian languages.