Romanticism and the Apocalypse

“There is always room for heroism in life” – this inscription can be found in one of the bars in the centre of Minsk, the artist’s hometown. According to Aliaksei Kolas, it is often the irrational and illogical that makes one show their character and reveals their inner beauty. The artist recalls that as a child he used to spend every summer at his grandmother’s house in a village that was both half-empty and full of life. It was not far from the place where Adam Mickiewicz was born. It was surrounded by rolling hills and meadows, winding, narrow rivers shrouded in mist, pink sunsets in the evening and a dark, humming forest all around.

Each night we would gather together and Grandma and Grandpa would tell endless stories about their lives and the people who had lived there before them. Now I can’t go there anymore, and I guess that’s why romanticism is so close to me, the artist explains.

Today, mass torture in Belarus is a grim reality, and Ukrainians have been left at the mercy of the dreadful Russian monster. The tributes paid to the heroes and the unceasing admiration – especially in the media – fail to constitute an adequate response to the ongoing savagery. Without real assistance, Ukrainians and Belarusians remain little more than cannon fodder on the battlefield or corpses in prisons. Similarly, in the face of what may be the greatest environmental catastrophe, our way of life persists through popular but superficial solutions and convenient excuses, for which no one is willing to assume full responsibility.

Last year I spent a lot of time researching the subject of the apocalypse, writes Aliaksei. That’s when I came across a photo of a glass window covered with a lot of red and white tape, and this photo inspired me to create a project in which I show a broken, abandoned space marked in a similar way.