A soldier sees death as an inextricable part of life, understanding that death is the only true thing in a world of uncertainty. Death is a soldier's constant companion and each soldier must accept it and find a way to live with it.

Funeral Table (Kanun)

Full size: 1120 x 1155 x 317 mm
Candle without wick: 260 x 17 x 11 mm
Table: 847 x 1155 x 317 mm
Wax, burnt wood, threads
2022 - 2023
Berlin, Germany

3d modelling for soldier form:
Aliaksandr Adamau

The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
Established in 1917 as NKVD of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the agency was originally tasked with conducting regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, with its functions being dispersed among other agencies, only to be reinstated as an all-union commissariat in 1934.
The functions of the OGPU (the secret police organization) were transferred to the NKVD in 1934, giving it a monopoly over law enforcement activities that lasted until the end of World War II. During this period, the NKVD included both ordinary public order activities, as well as secret police activities. The NKVD is known for its role in political repression and for carrying out the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin. It was led by Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria.
The NKVD undertook mass extrajudicial executions of untold numbers of citizens, and conceived, populated and administered the Gulag system of forced labour camps. Their agents were responsible for the repression of the wealthier peasantry, as well as the mass deportations of entire nationalities to uninhabited regions of the country. They oversaw the protection of Soviet borders and espionage (which included political assassinations), and enforced Soviet policy in communist movements and puppet governments in other countries, most notably the repression and massacres in Poland.
In March 1946 all People's Commissariats were renamed to Ministries, and the NKVD became the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).

(Read More)

Laundry Soap

Laundry Soap 3 (F. E. Dzerzhinsky)
Material: soap, postage stamp
92 x 68 x 45 mm
2020

Laundry Soap 2 (I. A. Akulov)
Material: soap, postage stamp
92 x 68 x 45 mm
2020

Laundry Soap 1 (S. V. Kosior)
Material: soap, postage stamp
92 x 68 x 45 mm
2020

Laundry Soap 4 (V. R. Menzhinsky)
Material: soap, postage stamp
92 x 68 x 45 mm
2020

A lament or lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form. The grief is most often born of regret, or mourning. Laments can also be expressed in a verbal manner in which participants lament about something that they regret or someone that they have lost, and they are usually accompanied by wailing, moaning and/or crying. Laments constitute some of the oldest forms of writing, and examples exist across human cultures.

Many of the oldest and most lasting poems in human history have been laments. The Lament for Sumer and Ur dates back at least 4000 years to ancient Sumer, the world's first urban civilization. Laments are present in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and laments continued to be sung in elegiacs accompanied by the aulos in classical and Hellenistic Greece. Elements of laments appear in Beowulf, in the Hindu Vedas, and in ancient Near Eastern religious texts. They are included in the Mesopotamian city laments such as the Lament for Ur and the Jewish Tanakh, (which would later become the Christian Old Testament).

In many oral traditions, both early and modern, the lament has been a genre usually performed by women: Batya Weinbaum made a case for the spontaneous lament of women chanters in the creation of the oral tradition that resulted in the Iliad The material of lament, the "sound of trauma" is as much an element in the Book of Job as in the genre of pastoral elegy, such as Shelley's "Adonais" or Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis".

The Book of Lamentations or Lamentations of Jeremiah figures in the Old Testament. The Lamentation of Christ (under many closely variant terms) is a common subject from the Life of Christ in art, showing his dead body being mourned after the Crucifixion.

(Read More)

One Thousand and
One Tears

Project:
Happy Death Society

One Thousand and One Tears
Medium: photoprint, photo frame, glass, tears, sodium chloride, water for injection
258 x 198 mm
2020

The photo shows the territory of the village Abramaushchyna, Smarhon district, Belarus. In its place used to stand an isolated farmhouse where my grandma Lena lived with her family. The farmhouse got sold and my grandmother moved to town. Now this place is occupied by birch trees growing amongst the rocks hauled from the nearby fields.

The Malachite Box or The Malachite Casket is a book of fairy tales and folk tales (also known as skaz) of the Ural region of Russia compiled by Pavel Bazhov and published from 1936 to 1945. It is written in contemporary language and blends elements of everyday life with fantastic characters. It was awarded the Stalin prize in 1942. Bazhov's stories are based on the oral lore of the miners and gold prospectors.
The first edition of The Malachite Box was published on 28 January 1939. It consisted of 14 stories and an introduction, which contained some information about the life, industry and culture of the Urals and which the author tried to include into every edition of the collection. Later versions contained more than 40 stories. Not all stories are equally popular nowadays. The most popular tales were written between 1936 and 1939: "The Mistress of the Copper Mountain" and its continuation "The Malachite Casket", "The Stone Flower" and its continuation "The Master Craftsman", "Silver Hoof", "Cat's Ears", "Sinyushka's Well", "The Manager's Boot-Soles". Among the later stories, "A Fragile Twig" (1940), "The Fire-Fairy" (1940), "Tayutka's Mirror" (1941), "Ivanko Krylatko" (1943), "That Spark of Life" (1943) are popular. The characters of the Ural Mountains folklore such as the Mistress of the Copper Mountain became very well known after their appearance in Pavel Bazhov's The Malachite Box.

(Read More)

The Malachite Casket

Project:
Happy Death Society

The Malachite Casket
Material: celain figurine, photo print
29 x 25 x 25 сm
2019

In religion, paradise is a place of exceptional happiness and delight. Paradisiacal notions are often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both, often compared to the miseries of human civilization: in paradise there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, a land of luxury and fulfillment. Paradise is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, in contrast to this world, or underworlds such as Hell.
In eschatological contexts, paradise is imagined as an abode of the virtuous dead. In Christian and Islamic understanding, Heaven is a paradisiacal relief.

(Read More)

I Forget the Pattern in the Carpet

Project:
Happy Death Society

I Forget the Pattern in the Carpet
Medium: carpet, photo print, photo frame, hole
200 x 300 сm
2019

CONNECTION TO THE EARTH

A recurring literary motif is the bond between Adam and the earth (adamah): God creates Adam by molding him out of clay in the final stages of the creation narrative. After the loss of innocence, God curses Adam and the earth as punishment for his disobedience. Adam and humanity are cursed to die and return to the earth (or ground) from which he was formed. This "earthly" aspect is a component of Adam's identity, and Adam's curse of estrangement from the earth seems to describe humankind's divided nature of being earthly yet separated from nature. God himself, who took of the dust from all four corners of the earth with each color (red, black, white, and green), then created Adam therewith, where the soul of Adam is the image of God.

MANKIND-HUMAN BEING-MALE INDIVIDUAL

The Bible uses the word אָדָם‎ ( 'adam ) in all of its senses: collectively ("mankind", Genesis 1:27), individually (a "man", Genesis 2:7), gender nonspecific ("man and woman", Genesis 5:1–2), and male (Genesis 2:23–24). In Genesis 1:27 "adam" is used in the collective sense, and the interplay between the individual "Adam" and the collective "humankind" is a main literary component to the events that occur in the Garden of Eden, the ambiguous meanings embedded throughout the moral, sexual, and spiritual terms of the narrative reflecting the complexity of the human condition. Genesis 2:7 is the first verse where "Adam" takes on the sense of an individual man (the first man), and the context of sex is absent; the gender distinction of "adam" is then reiterated in Genesis 5:1–2 by defining "male and female".

(Read More)

The Body

The Body
Material: clay, ground
470 x 364 x 113 cm
July 2013

The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "man is the measure of all things". This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the revived knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.

(Read More)

The Belarusian Renaissance

The Belarusian Renaissance
28,5 x 18 x 8 cm
Ready-made
June 2013

The Belarusian Renais-sance