Aleksei Shinkarenko

Less an authored work and more an archive, the Pavilion of Belarus, curated by Aleksei Shinkarenko, stages an intimate encounter between audience members and hundred-year-old photographs from the Minsk Centre of Photography's albums from the First World War. Individuals take the place of abstract stories of territorial and political conflict. “Which photograph was most memorable?” asks an accompanying document, and a previous visitor has responded. “We look closely…the cemetery, the wooden crosses show where his friends and colleagues lie. Did the ‘photographer’ move so far away from these graves so they would hardly show?”