Portal:

kalektar.org

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• Research platform of contemporary Belarusian art and internet portal kalektar.org. Non-state cultural organization.

The platform is a tool for archiving, analyzing and popularizing contemporary Belarusian art. The project was founded primarily as a tool for creating and consistently filling an archive dedicated to Belarusian art of recent decades. The main tool of the platform is a portal with a magazine and an INDEX (encyclopedia). The platform aims to create a museum of contemporary Belarusian art in Belarus.

As part of the activities of the KALEKTAR platform, the efforts and experience of a large number of experts in the field of contemporary Belarusian art are consolidated to create, analyze and publish archives of the local art scene, critically assess the Belarusian cultural system, and promote the statements of Belarusian authors in the country and abroad.

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The main projects of the platform:

Portal KALEKTAR - a magazine about contemporary Belarusian art;

INDEX - a dynamic encyclopedia of contemporary Belarusian art (a key tool of the archive construction platform);

ZBOR - a research resource on key artistic expressions in contemporary Belarusian art and a series of large-scale research exhibitions;

Agitational Criticism (FAK) is a course of lectures on contemporary art for students of art educational institutions in Belarus.

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Main team:

Founders: Alexey Borisyonok, Sergey Kiryushchenko, Sergey Shabokhin.

Head of the platform and editor-in-chief of the portal: Sergey Shabokhin.

Development of a new version of the portal: Maxim Tyminko.

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Reasons for the emergence of the platform:

The platform was created primarily due to dissatisfaction with the situation in contemporary Belarusian art, as well as the relative invisibility of the experience of Belarusian art in the Eastern European and international context. By inertia, the official cultural policy of Belarus retained the features of the Soviet period, borrowing a centralized vertical bureaucratic system of culture management. On the one hand, the current political regime in the mid-1990s abolished or extremely complicated the activities of independent institutions (non-state galleries, foundations, associations), as well as criminalized foreign funding, which led to a long-term stagnation of the art system and the absence of an institution for the study of contemporary Belarusian art, which would carry out archival activities and promote integration into the international artistic context. As a result, during the reassessment of the artistic experience of Eastern Europe in all major studies of the 1990s–2000s, Belarus was practically excluded from the general archive, remaining a "blank spot" on the map of Eastern European art. Despite the fact that there are various official institutions in the country, their activities are devoid of effective research and archival work in the field of contemporary art and do not stand up to criticism.

After 2005, in the environment of independent culture, noticeable processes of activation and consolidation of the art community were observed, which led to the opening of non-state institutions - galleries, publications, Internet portals, research and exhibitions. A lot of material was collected that needs to be preserved and accumulated information and experience in order to create an open archive of contemporary Belarusian art, not only in order to avoid the loss and oblivion of the next period in the development of art, but also as an example of the fight against the arbitrariness of official cultural policy. So it was decided to create an independent research platform of contemporary Belarusian art KALEKTAR.

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Selected dates:

2014

The research platform of contemporary Belarusian art KALEKTAR was founded on the initiative of Sergei Kiryushchenko, Alexei Borisyonok and Sergei Shabokhin. Artist Sergey Kiryushchenko published an article on the Art Aktivist portal in 2014, in which he invited the community to think about the idea of creating a private museum of contemporary art M21. After a long discussion of the presented project with various experts, the artist Sergey Shabokhin joined the development of the concept, with whom they rethought the expediency and timeliness of the proposal to form a museum. As a result, the project received significant transformations towards research activities and the creation of an open archive, rather than a museum. It was decided to create an archive in the form of an open Internet resource, which was conceived as a work in progress - a site constantly filled with archival information. In order to create the most diverse and wide archive, it became necessary to combine disparate strategies and sources of information. Together with the curator Alexey Borisyonok, the artists developed the concept of a common project to create the KALEKTAR research platform, bringing together various initiatives and approaches to creating an archive.

March 30, 2015

Internet portal kalektar.org was developed by Sergey Shabokhin and Hainter Active studio and officially presented in Minsk.

2015

The KALEKTAR platform team prepared the research project ZBOR. This project presents 40 selected works by Belarusian artists created from the 1980s to 2014. All selected works are one of the key statements that determined, to one degree or another, the development of various areas of Belarusian contemporary art.

August 28 – October 8, 2015

A large-scale research exhibition "ZBOR. Constructing an Archive" and a presentation of the KALEKTAR platform and the ZBOR project were held at the Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok. Curators: Sergey Shabokhin and Sergey Kiryushchenko.

March 31 – May 6, 2016

The second exhibition-presentation was held in Kiev in the spring of 2016 at the IZOLYATSIA Foundation under the title "ZBOR. Belarusian Art Movement". The curators have changed, changing the exposition and ways of displaying archives - Andrey Dureiko and Maxim Tyminko have become them.

October 16 – November 30, 2018

Curators Andrei Dureiko and Maxim Tyminko held the third presentation of a large-scale research and exhibition project ZBOR called ZBOR in Progress at the Ў Modern Art Gallery in Minsk.

2020

A decision was made and a project was launched to reorganize the platform and portal with the support of the platform partner of the Rönne Stiftung Foundation from Berlin.

September 1, 2021

The platform temporarily moved to the space of Gray Mandorla Studio in Poznań.

October 7 – November 3, 2021

The platform became the organizer of the international group exhibition "ODKSZTAŁCENIE / DEPHARMACY / UNLEARNING" in the Domie space in Poznań. Curator group: Alexey Borisyonok, Vera Zalutskaya and Roman Trotsyuk.

November 20, 2021

The new website of the platform was officially presented. The artist Maxim Tyminko acted as the developer of the new portal and reorganized the resource into a modern and easy-to-use database. The new portal was implemented with the support of the Federal Foreign Office, Civil Society Cooperation and the Rönne Stiftung Foundation.

2022

The platform establishes a residence for Belarusian representatives of culture in Poznań with the support of the Rönne Stiftung Foundation and the Domie space. This year, Olga Arkhipova and Alexey Lunev became the first residents.

September 28 – October 11, 2022

The platform organizes the Belarusian-Polish-Ukrainian group exhibition Coalition.

End of october

A new tool has been programmed on the platform website: automatic translation into English, Belarusian and Russian.