BY LAW. Collaboration with Lesia Pcholka
3D printing, silkprinting, glass, wood, coins, paint, videoToday, as the borders have become a place of conflict and war again, emigration becomes an obstacle for people from different parts of the world. As citizens of Belarus, we were forced to leave the country after detention and protests in 2020-21. In emigration a person faces their own problems, and such issues as legalization and obtaining certain documents become a costly payment for emigrants, and this is also the case for emigrants who are in need of legalization. The immigrant's goal is trapped between the impossibility of returning to their home country and the impossibility of becoming a citizen of the country, as those who became citizens of the country by right of birth.
Marriage has long seemed a relic of patriarchal society but it is even more interesting to see how the institution of marnage works in different countries and is linked to practices of caring, access to the other with the right to help in times of emergency, in situations where laws don't work or don't work for everyone. For example, officially after the protests in Belarus there was information that there are 1500 political prisoners in the country, in reality there are hundreds of times more, there are thousands of families who take care of their relatives, forced by the regime to remain in prison. And in order to be able to give aid to prisoners (medicines, clothes, food), one must be a family member. Now political prisoners are restricted even in correspondence and can only receive letters from relatives, and thousands of letters of solidarity and support never reach them.
In turn, the institution of marriage gives an emigrant in Poland the same opportunity to be the first person to come to help a loved one, and to be a source of security and minimal stability if you are not a full-fledged citizen in your home country or place of migration.
The work presents a sort of new immigrant interior design a wedding bouquet in the form of the countries through which we emigrated. Borders and countries are always presented as natural things that have developed naturally historically, although they are also designer and artificial. like flowers printed on a 30 printer. Money as an important marker of the state loses its capital and signs, and simply becomes decorative objects Like a tablecloth or handkerchief made from the documents we received to be able to register a marriage.
The Emigration Museum in Gdynia. Gdynia, Poland
"SUPLEMENT" is a curatorial series of exhibitions of works by visual artists, addressing the issue of assimilation in the migration process.
Curator: Maksymilian Bochenek
The SURVIVAL Art Review21 “Ersatz”. Wroclaw, Poland
Curators: Michał Bieniek, Daniel Brożek, Anna Kołodziejczyk, Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz, Ewa Pluta