Political agency is normally associated with activity, movement, effort. Our focus is on the practices, gestures and events, which may be unnoticed and which suspend the common understanding of agency and action.
We have been working on this programme in the midst of the anti-government protest in Belarus, which revealed — and continues to reveal— the multitude of everyday forms of resistance and militancy, that complicate the notion of political struggle. Interruption and exhaustion are the key concepts in this regard. They are materialised through the practices of strikes, blockages, refusal, sabotage. They are also woven into the temporality of political resistance. The temporality of interruption and exhaustion, which both encompasses legacies of the past and is driven by the desire of the future, saturates the present moment.
What possibilities are held in exhaustion and interruption, especially if they are considered contrary to the notion of a movement as the basic element of protest? When and how long does a revolutionary event happen, and what kinds of gestures embrace it? What are the rhythms, affects, ruptures and desires within the modern regimes of work and non-work? Which shared intimacies and collective agencies emerge in the traces of the past technologies and contemporary digital platforms?
Not aiming to cover the multitude of post-socialist experiences, the video programme refers to a specific temporal paradox of post-socialism, its focus on the ontology of time and how it is saturated with exhaustion. Will it be able to break its own past or interrupt its own future?
Aleksei Borisionok (b. 1992) – curator, writer, and organiser, who currently lives and works in Minsk and Vienna. He is a member of the artistic-research group “Problem Collective” and “Work Hard! Play Hard!” working group. He writes about art and politics for various magazines, catalogues, and online platforms. His writings were published in “L’Internationale Online”, “Partisan”, “Moscow Art Magazine”, “Springerin”, “Hjärnstorm”, “Paletten”, “syg.ma” among others. In his current research, he focuses on the temporalities of post-socialism.
Olia Sosnovskaya is an artist, researcher, writer and organizer based in Vienna and Minsk. She works with text, performance and visual arts. Currently a PhD-in-Practice Candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Co-founder of WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! self-organized platform and a member of artistic-research group Problem Collective. Published in TQW Magazin, Paletten, Moscow Art Magazine, pARTisankA among others.
Recent artistic projects and residences include Centrale Fies, Italy (2021); Konstepidemin, Gothenburg (2020), Tanzquartier, Vienna (2019); PACT Zollverein, Essen (2017); ‘The Kyiv International – Kyiv Biennial’ (2017).
Keywords: interruption, exhaustion, postsocialisms, temporality, work, interface, strike, trace, refusal, gesture, desire, loop, labour unrest, rhythm, opacity, effect, ghost, event, repetition, catastrophe, movement, social movement, history
The program:
Outsourcing paradise/parasite by eefff, 2020
arbeit keine arbeit by Marina Naprushkina, 2019.
Fairy Tale Ends by Pavel Khailo, 2017
copia de la copia (de la copia) by Rafal Morusiewicz, 2020
Labor Safety in the Region of Dnipropetrovsk by Daniil Revkovsky and Andriy Rachinsky, 2018
She turns her head, she lifts the pen by Elske Rosenfeld, 2013
Ti ne ver’ slezam by Anton Sarokin, 2017