Practices of Subordination

The Practices of Subordination are an archive of objects, textual and visual documents, video and audio recordings which to Sergey Shabohin constitute universal representations of fear. It is a collection of semiophores – things that carry meanings – of a very special kind; they refer to the experience of totalitarian and authoritarian political systems, to terror and surveillance extending to all spheres of life. A constellation of everyday items conceals a grid of densely packed meanings, which together create both the literal and the metaphorical image of the relation between an individual and an oppressive state.

Shabohin began to amass this private archive of things in 2010. Since then, in the public spaces of Minsk and in private houses, he has sought objects which only seemingly are silent witnesses to the brutality with which the Belarusian regime treats its citizens. Shabohin investigates the destructive influence the state exerts on the individual, showing that it begins even before this individual’s birth (through birth control and infringement of women’s rights) and continues after their death (through the regime’s management of the memory of the deceased, especially that of dissidents). With time, Shabohin’s collection acquired an increasingly comprehensive character: apart from objects, it began to include oral history recordings made by the citizens of Belarus and visitors to the country. This multi-layered project, situated on the borderlines between several disciplines, was to a considerable extent shaped by the present-day debates in the field of the humanities. The new research focus on archives and things, the archival turn and the material turn, as well as studies concerning the urban fabric are the pertinent interpretative directions here.

Shabohin’s work in the collection of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok is a cycle of eighteen paintings which are a visual representation of the archive’s structure, consisting of eighteen sets of objects. In keeping with the principle of pars pro toto, each canvas shows one object which stands for a larger set. This cycle of portraits of things is a sui generis lesson of anatomy: an analysis of the Belarusian regime’s operation methods, its mechanisms of governance and its ideological foundations. Tokens amassed in Shabohin’s collection relate to fear, the authorities’ patriarchal attitude, the state’s economic instability, the propaganda, the Belarusian culture’s conservatism, the surveillance to which its citizens are subjected, the acts of terror, as well as to the signals of social rebellion. Yet in his archivistic passion, Shabohin refers to the future as well: the eighteenth set pertains to the limits of the regime’s power and the possible scenarios for its fall.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz