Belarus, ICORN, 2023, in Berlin
Olga
Bubich
Olga Bubich is a writer, journalist, photographer, lecturer, and art critic from Belarus. Since starting her work in the early 2000s, she has focused on cultural, social, and political themes. Her photography has featured in exhibitions in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, The Netherlands, Italy, and Germany. Olga is the recipient of numerous prizes for her work, including ‘Publication of the year’ (Month of Photography in Minsk, 2017), ‘Kultura Vazhyz’ (‘Culture Matters’, 2016), ‘On the Way to Contemporary Museum’ (2015), and the prize for Erik Stepanjan’s Lucas photobook review (St. Petersburg, 2014).
Prior to 2020, Bubich primarily wrote about art, culture, and photography, both in Belarus and abroad, and was responsible for organising The Month of Photography in Minsk festival. For 13 years, between 2003 and 2016, Bubich also worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Speech Communication at the Belarusian State University, authoring several textbooks as part of her job.
In 2021, Olga Bubich published her second photobook The Art of (not) Forgetting and grew more interested in the topics of memory, memory censorship, cultural amnesia, post-memory, and memorialisation. As part of this, she created a short series of lectures and practical tasks on these themes, and she has, so far, taught them online to over 30 artists and photographers based in and out of Belarus due to forced migration. In 2021-2023, she co-organised four exhibitions in Berlin, Tbilisi, and Batumi, bringing together artists whose work challenges the conventional understanding of collective and personal memory and addresses the issues of propaganda resistance.
Since December 2022, she is living in Berlin as ICORN fellow. Her first public presentation took place in the framework of DRIFTING ACCUMULATION MINSK, an exhibition at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. During her ICORN residency, Olga Bubich has continued her work. Her focus has been the issue of memory and forgetting from different perspectives, and counter-memory activism through art through exploring the memorialisation cultures of Germany, Austria, Belarus, Poland, Argentina, Russia, and Hong Kong.
