War Witness Archive - Belorussian pavilion

War Witness Archive is open for visitors of Venice biennale. From 6 to 11 of May you can look at the photographs from the Archive, talk with a curators of the pavilion Aleksei Shinkarenko and Olga Rybchiskaya, add your reaction on the picture to the Archive data base.

War Witness Archive is an artistic inventory of memory about world wars. The project has started as the research of photographic archive related to the World War I history and is now developing in contrast to the World War II photographic archive.

The Archive forms its body collecting testimonies about past events stored in the memory of contemporaries. The exposition at the Contemporary Arts Museum in 2014 has become the first embodiment of WWA. The project continues its lifecycle where a traditional photographic archive gets a new state, a state of metaarchive.

The Archive nowadays is a flow of history waves which gains new features echoing all it contacts with. Spreading itself in the contemporary context and getting new forms, gathering actual reactions on itself. It is a process where The Archive constantly memorizes new states and directs the knowledge obtained on the work with its content - the unconcious nature of world catastrophies.

On the first stage of its realization the WWA project has absorbed the local context, surroundings and mentality of Belarusians seeking answer to the question - what does it mean to be witness of historic event today? The Archive goes now into global context. And inside the Archive appears a space for dialogue concerning understanding and the possibility of witness's voice to be heard.

Aleksei Shinkarenko