Collection

Sergey Shabohin has been creating the multimedia project We Are Stern Consumers of Cultural Revolutions since 2012. It is devoted to the heritage of the historic avant-garde group UNOVIS, founded by Kazimir Malevich in the early 1920s in Vitebsk. UNOVIS members such as Malevich, Vera Ermolaeva, El Lissitzky, Nikolai Suetin and others made key contribution to the global avant-garde. Shabohin points out that the ideals of the group were prized and recognised above all by “Western” culture. The Belarusian post-Soviet cultural policy adopted the prejudice of Soviet authorities against avant-garde artists. Currently, there are practically no original works, publications or documents left in Vitebsk from the activity of the UNOVIS group. The neon is illuminated so that the letters read alternately either “Eastern consumers” or  “Western consumers.” Shabohin stresses the conventionality of art history and geography and criticizes the effort to “nationalize” artists of the 20^th-century avant-garde, whose works were intended to be international and supranational.

Visual artist, curator, activist. In 2004–2009 he studied at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts in Minsk. Shabohin creates installations, conceptual objects, photographs, video, painting, art in public spaces, and site-specific installations. He also works with archives and initiates long-term artistic research. He focuses on themes involving social, cultural and art-historical systems. Shabohin’s works are created in series, and their elements are often adapted to the context in which they are presented. In 2011–2014 he was editor in chief of Art Aktivist, an online magazine devoted to contemporary Belarusian art, and since 2015 he has been editor in chief of the portal Kalektar. He has lived and worked in Poland since 2016—since 2020 in Poznań.