The reference to the cultural tradition of embroidery is a modern feminine context in Belarus‘ agenda today. The roots of the potato are intertwined with the patriarchal ideology of the Belarusian state and the protest movement. According to agrarian mythology, a Belarusian is born from a potato root and raised as a representative of a patient, farming people. A group of women came together to create an embroidered four-meter-long canvas. The collective work in this case is a kind of general trance, a psychotherapeutic effect.

In 2020, the massive civil society protests that erupted against the repressive state in Belarus were nicknamed the Slipper Revolution and the Anti-Cockroach Revolution, in reference to a popular children’s poem originally published in 1923. (Footnote 2) It tells the story of an authoritarian yet fragile insect and his brief, chaotic reign of terror over all the other animals. To “get a beating” with a slipper, which in the poem marks the end of the dictatorial cockroach, evokes an image of female resoluteness, which has been popularized in Internet culture of recent years through memes that frame the woman with the slipper, typically a motherly (often Balkan) housewife, as a figure of domestic authority. Women were at the forefront of the Belarusian protests in 2020-2021. Risking imprisonment, abuse, rape, and torture as the government violently suppressed the movement, the women gathered weekly, holding flowers and flags, dressed in white. In the context of those moments of gathering, Vasilisa Palianina’s textile work And the One Who Believes in Me Will Live Forever (2020-21) was created in a process of collective embroidery, a ritual of female solidarity. Meticulously hand-stitched with black and red thread, among the many motifs, words, and phrases, women’s faces and limbs sprawling across the four-meter canvas, a group of insects populates the lower edge of this tableau vivant. Unlike the figure of the oppressive cockroach, these potato beetles appear as if silently chewing their way through the fabric, destabilizing its weave and foundation in an unnoticed act of sabotage. Vasilisa Palianina created the second work on display at Akademie der Künste three years later, in exile. Similarly embroidered, knitted and stitched, The Mother of Flowers (2023–24) seems to tell a darker continuation of the story; female creatures form a dancing chain around a flower-like pattern, evoking a sense of trauma and disorientation, beauty and monstrosity, violence and resilience. To repair and renew, to weave together, to patch, to heal: These are notions integral to how textile art is still oftentimes characterized – A medium notoriously undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history, gendered as feminine and marginalized in its association with craft and domestic labor, similar to how the aforementioned image of the housewife with the slipper risks belittling her agency as a political subject by reducing her to a domestic one. Against this notion of textile art as a domestic practice of care or mending, Palianina’s works also show us the reverse sides of these embroideries, all the loose and entangled threads that get caught, intertwined, and twisted in loops, recognizing the complexity and disorder of our relationships, of political accountability and agency.

Linnéa Bake

Vielen Dank für die Hilfe: Mariam Asatryan,
Sasha Dorskaya, Sashen Galerik, Kristina
Brukshtyn, Polina Siriska, Kateryna
Ignashevich, Anna Crook, Uliana Dulkina,
Tatsiana Karpachova, Masha Maroz, Ira J,
Tasha Katsuba, Alexandra Yasipovich