THE GHOST OF ALI SAVASHEVICH DOMINATES THE NAVE OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The opening of the SEFO 2024 Triennial is fast approaching, and with it comes the preparation of the main exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art’s Triple Arcade – MOMENTS. Its entry is already dominated by the work Ghost, which the Belarusian artist Ala Savashevich has come to Olomouc to install.

“The ghost is an interpretation of my monument and my attitude towards monuments, but at the same time it is a reference to the existing Lenin monument from my hometown Stolin in Belarus. My perception of Lenin, knowing history and his role in it, is quite different from the older generation. I grew up in a different era, and these monuments have always seemed more abstract to me than to those who grew up in the Soviet Union. The starting point of my work was the monument as a shape, an art form, and then as the person it represents, in this case Lenin. But my work is not a monument in the standard sense of the word. It depicts an immaterial ghost – a spectre that haunts Europe; once a living person that provokes real fear, now only an image of history and memory that provokes general hostility and anger – like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, as Boris Groys writes in The Communist Postscript,” Svashevich says of his work.

See how the installation went:

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)