LESIA PCHOLKA

Lesia Pcholka is a visual artist born in Belarus, currently lives and works in Berlin/DE and Bielsk Podlaski/PL

Curator of the VEHA archive platform, which is dedicated to researching and preserving vernacular Belarusian archival photography.

Pcholka’s practice brings together archival methods, collective memoriesy, and historical continuities to show explore how the past shapes contemporary life in Belarus and beyond. Through photography, video, and installation, she explores the tension between official narratives and undocumented histories, focusing on voices often silenced. Her work situates Belarus within a broader comparative frame, tracing parallels with other authoritarian contexts while also probing spaces of resistance. Exile sharpens her attention to displacement, belonging, and fragile memory, while gender perspectives inform her sensitivity to embodied experience and power. By mobilizing community archives and approaches in experimental storytelling, Pcholka creates layered narratives that move between personal and political, private and collective — reimagining how histories can be remembered and resisted.

PČOŁKA / PCHOLKA / PCZOŁKA

soon :

SOFTSHELL ARCHIPEL

13. 02 – 10. 04. 2026
Gallery 5020 / FÜNFZIGZWANZIG. Salzburg, AT

on view :

CV

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ROADSIDE OBJECTS

Working with archival photography and the history of everyday life, Lesia Pcholka turned to the well-known works of Belarusian ethnographers. Pcholka's series of photographs ‘Roadside objects’ is inspired by Mikhail Romanyuk's monograph ‘Belarusian Folk Crosses’ (2000), which is the culmination of 30-plus years of meticulous research and documentation of Belarusian funerary and roadside crosses. The crosses, which were usually placed on roadsides in villages or at crossroads, were intended to protect people from epidemics, wars and natural disasters. These objects organically combine elements of both Christian and pagan beliefs, which is a characteristic feature of Belarusian spirituality.

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TRY TO READ MY STONES

Try to Read My Stones is dedicated to the historical geography of space in the formation of modern Belarus – a country without mountains or access to the sea, located at the crossroads of cultures and religions.

The installation consists of nine maps of Belarus embedded in old school chairs. Each corresponds to a key historical period of the 20th century (1918, 1918-1919, 1919, 1920-1921, 1922-1924, 1924-1927, 1938-1940, 1941-1945). The shifting borders reflect the violent and dynamic changes that Belarus has experienced because of regime changes, the collapse and emergence of different political systems, wars, and occupations. These events have left a deep imprint on the local culture and collective consciousness. One tangible result is the eclectic nature of Belarusian visual culture, with its tendency to freely combine meanings, references, and cultural codes.

HEAVIER THAN AIR

The installation takes the form of a collage of photographs of women’s grave medallions found in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. These cracked, chipped, weathered and broken medallions are printed on fabric. Taken in cemeteries in regions marked by ever-shifting borders and competing empires, the portraits are anonymous, yet hold traces of individual lives lost to official narratives. Through these fragmented images, I engage with the hidden histories of everyday life – the lives of women who did not take part in wars, but endured them. Their stories remain undocumented, obscured by memory practices inflected by conflict, ideology, and state power.

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THE BASES

In The Bases, Pcholka addresses the tumultuous history of Minsk, where the new autocratic regime installed an extensive network of surveillance cameras on Stalinist post-war architecture. Pcholka created casts of lamppost bases from the main boulevards of Minsk – where the most important protest marches took place in 2020 – and mounted cameras on them, symbolizing the regime’s permanent state surveillance, which extends even to those in exile.

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DESCENT INTO THE MARSH

Published in late 2024,just before Belarus's 2025 elections, the book draws attention to ongoing repression, which has left thousands of political prisoners and forced a million to flee. The author links protests in Belarus and Hong Kong as examples of modern resistance shaped by digital control and China's influence.

Seven illustrated chapters explore shared tactics and symbols gestures of unity, symbolic colours, and objects like umbrellas

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INVISIBLE TRAUMA

This project focuses on the experiences of Belarusians who suffer from psychological violence perpetrated by the regime and law enforcement agencies. It is a collection of stories about knocks on the door, phone calls from unknown numbers, and how people in Belarus are suffering from a terrible case of post-traumatic stress disorder. As long as this trauma remains invisible and untreated, it will affect generations of Belarusians .

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SUNSET OVER A SWAMP

In my installation, I use these newspapers to refer to the long-standing practice of using state flags to decorate the city — a tradition dating back to the Soviet period. The red-and-green flags that line the streets — their design endorsed through rigged referenda — are not true national symbols, but rather emblems of imposed conformity. This form reflects the persistent visual strategies employed by such regimes. Like the propaganda press, these symbols are imbued with fear, hatred and resentment — not by accident, but as deliberate instruments of governance.

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HEIMAT

Video, 4:45

We exist amid war and violence, where human currents become the background of the news. Memory turns into an unstable construction, governed by regimes and politics. This video is like a living monument to refugees bodies resembling both monuments and flags, frozen in motion. Monuments to the present, to which no future is given

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BY LAW

sculptures, video, found objects
Collaboration with Uladzimir Hramovich

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