Ekaterina Kenigsberg about the event:

"From May 23 to June 20, 1997, the Sixth Line hosted the exhibition Traditions and Experiments, subtitled International Exhibition of Contemporary Art Projects. The exhibition was organized with the support of the Polish Institute in Minsk. The idea for a joint exhibition came about during the InFormation'96 festival held in Vitebsk in 1996, where an extensive collection of works by Fluxus artists, works by mail art artist and contemporary art theorist Anastasii Bohdan Wisniewski and followers of his theory of the so-called tape art were presented – artists Andrzej Dombek, Tadeusz Mysłowski, Nina Dunin, Leopold Deka, Grace Kolch, and Eulalia Domanowska [1, pp. 89–90].

Eulalia Domanowska, who had experience as a curator in international projects, was responsible for the international component of the exhibition "Traditions and Experiments". Her curatorial strategy consisted of introducing the names of contemporary Polish authors into the context of world art. The fundamental part of the exhibition was the documentation of works and works by famous artists - representatives of the international Fluxus movement Ben Vautier (France), Larry Miller (USA), Jeffrey Hendricks (USA); participant of the international exhibition Construction in Process III (Lodz, Poland, 1990) Luigi Pasotelli (Italy), who worked in visual poetry; artist, publisher, curator Jurgen O. Olbrich (Germany), a representative of concrete and visual poetry, mailart and copy art, participant of the world exhibition of contemporary art "documenta 8" (1987); poet and artist of the surrealist movement Erna Rosenstein (Poland). They were echoed by conceptually similar works by contemporary Polish artists Ryszard Lugowski, Andrzej Dąbek, Andrzej Urbanski, Eulalia Domanowska, Wiesław Łuczaj, Paweł Nowak and American artists of Polish origin Tadeusz Mysłowski, Katarzyna Czerpak, Leopold Deca and Grace Kolch. In this way, the international context of contemporary Polish art was shown and an international component of the exhibition was created. Curator Eulalia Domanowska insisted that the distinctive feature of Traditions and Experiments is “that objects of traditional art, such as paintings, graphics and sculpture, make up only a small part of it. Most of the works presented in the exhibition can be called experimental in the broadest sense of the word” [2].

The local part included works by Belarusian artists Lyudmila Rusova, Olga Sazykina, Igor Savchenko, Sergei Babariko and Vitold Levchenya. It should be noted that the desire for experimentation, the desire to create synthetic works, and a conceptual approach are highly characteristic of, for example, Lyudmila Rusova and Olga Sazykina. Thus, in this exhibition of contemporary art projects, Olga Sazykina presented the project "Unit of Personal Measurement", which became the starting point in the artist's work with personal messages as artistic media and the comprehension of time with their help. The installation was a weaving loom, restored from memory by a folk craftsman from the Grodno region. Near the loom there was a bench and a basket with working material - letters and scissors. The endless movement of the weaver's hand is similar to the movement of the hand when writing, and the process of creating a woven fabric is similar to correspondence with the outside world. O. Sazykina used these analogies as the basis for the project. From the preserved old letters of friends and relatives, cut into long strips, a quite readable canvas was woven – intertwined threads of thoughts, meanings, ideas. Randomly woven parts of letters in different languages formed a new international context, using the historical aspect of craft skills, utilitarian objects, everyday events in the conceptual world of contemporary art. The understanding of handwritten messages as media can be traced in the further work of O. Sazykina – the installation “Dialogue, or Tablecloth of Petals” (1997), the project “Bremen Diary” (1998) and other projects [3, pp. 70–73].

Lyudmila Rusova showed the final part of the project "Mummified Letter". The project, saturated with rhythms, graphic structures, event elements, demonstrated the performativity of the artist's vision. The verbal work of Igor Savchenko - text fragments and phrases on transparent paper, fixed on the glass of the huge gallery windows, created a different reality, emphasized the brevity of the event against the background of the constant variability of natural phenomena.

The international exhibition of contemporary art projects "Traditions and Experiments" is a successful experience of internationalizing the intellectual components of contemporary art". – © Ekaterina Kenigsberg "The Formation of Curating Contemporary Art in Belarus in the 1990s Using the Example of the Sixth Line Gallery Projects", Art and Culture. – 2020. – No. 4(40). – P. 20–280.

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• Notes:

• [1] Kopenkina, O. Exhibitions / O. Kopenkina // Art Magazine. – 1996. – No. 13. – P. 89–90.

• [2] Kenigsberg, E. Ya. Gallery "6th Line". 1992-1998 [Electronic resource] / E. Ya. Kenigsberg // Creative Association "Student Center for Contemporary Art "Alla Prima"". - Access mode: http://allaprima.by/галерея-6-ялиния-1992-1998/. - Access date: 03/24/2015.

• [3] Koenigsberg, K. Galowna’s idea of creation - creativity (conceptual projects by Volga Sazykina) / K. Koenigsberg // pARTisan. – 2004. – No. 3. – P. 70–73.

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Notes:

[1] Kopenkina, O. Exhibitions / O. Kopenkina // Art Magazine. – 1996. – No. 13. – P. 89–90.

[2] Kenigsberg, E. Ya. Gallery "6th Line". 1992-1998 [Electronic resource] / E. Ya. Kenigsberg // Creative Association "Student Center for Contemporary Art "Alla Prima"". - Access mode: http://allaprima.by/галерея-6-ялиния-1992-1998/. - Access date: 03/24/2015.

[3] Koenigsberg, K. Galowna’s idea of creation - creativity (conceptual projects by Volga Sazykina) / K. Koenigsberg // pARTisan. – 2004. – No. 3. – P. 70–73.