NEOPHYTE II, 2021

As Belarus is gripped by a major political crisis, mass protests and unprecedented violence, and the world is engulfed in a pandemic, Jura Shust films a group of Belarusian millennials who find themselves in a parallel world. As the artist himself writes, “Through the looking glass, where time has closed in a loop, where the past and the future are one.”* Young people go through a series of mysterious rituals that are references both to pagan myths and to the aimless pastimes of modern youth: they make drawings on the ground, burn a tree stump, sing, beat each other with nettles and decode burns. The forest becomes a place of protection, a shelter for magical and partisan forces, a space of non-linearity and freedom.

The installation includes: a two- channel video recording of this serene and hypnotic world; a salt carpet covering up the words “We will not forget” — the phrase inscribed on the pavement near the makeshift memorial to Alexander Taraikovsky (who was killed in the early days of the protests) that municipal workers would cover with salt; a numberless car crowned with pine needles that ran over the salt, hinting at the vehicles used by law enforcement to abduct people; as well as crepes hanging from branches that materialize from the video narrative as an archaic symbol of the sun. The heroes of the first part of the Neophyte I project (2019) were looking for crypto objects in the forest — bookmarks or fern flowers. In the second part, young people explore spaces of opacity and regeneration under conditions of authoritarian rule and total surveillance.

* Jura Shust. From his correspondence with the curators of the exhibition “Every Day.” 2021