RUFINA BAZLOVA AT BIENNALE MATTER OF ART 2026: EMBROIDERY AS AN ARCHIVE OF MEMORY AND AN ACT OF RESISTANCE

Until September 13, 2026, the Biennale Matter of Art unfolds across Prague and Pardubice, spanning three exhibition venues: the National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace and Tusculum Prague, both in Prague, and GAMPA – City Gallery Pardubice.

Curated by Jaroslava Tomanová, Jakub Gawkowski, and František Fekete, the biennale brings together more than thirty international artists and collectives around the idea of art as a practice of necessity—not as an aesthetic choice or a profession, but as a vital response to the political, social, and existential conditions of contemporary life. According to the curators, necessity can take the form of protest, solidarity, care, or withdrawal, becoming a means through which art strengthens communities, gives visibility to marginalized voices, and fosters new forms of resistance. It is within this framework that Belarusian artist Rufina Bazlova presents #FramedInBelarus, a project that transforms traditional embroidery into a powerful vehicle for collective memory and political activism.

Living in exile following the violent crackdown on the 2020 protests in Belarus, Bazlova launched the project together with art historian Sofia Tocar to document the human rights violations committed under the regime of Alexander Lukashenko. Through a participatory process, people from around the world embroider the portraits and stories of Belarusian political prisoners, contributing to the creation of a collective archive that restores visibility to those the regime seeks to erase from public memory.

At the core of the project is the visual language developed by the artist, known as vyzhyvanka—a neologism combining the Belarusian words vyshyvat (“to embroider”) and vyzhyvat (“to survive”). Bazlova reinterprets traditional Belarusian folk embroidery motifs using only red thread on a white background, a color palette that recalls the historic flag of the country’s democratic opposition. Traditionally associated with the domestic and feminine sphere, embroidery is reimagined here as a language of political dissent and a tool of civic resistance.

Since 2021, the project has involved more than 800 participants from 41 countries, creating a transnational network of solidarity. Each volunteer receives the story of a political prisoner, embroiders their portrait in cross-stitch, and returns it to the organizers, often accompanied by personal reflections. The slow, meditative act of stitching becomes a gesture of symbolic proximity—a gift of time that transforms a seemingly distant political reality into a deeply personal and shared experience.

At a time when human rights organizations recognize more than 4,300 political prisoners in Belarus, #FramedInBelarus has evolved into a constantly expanding archive that rescues these lives from oblivion through a slow, collective practice. The project demonstrates how a traditional craft can become a powerful instrument for preserving memory, fostering civic awareness, and inspiring political engagement.

At the Biennale Matter of Art, the project takes on a new spatial dimension. Installed in the Great Hall of the Trade Fair Palace, a monumental textile structure nearly seven meters high brings together 681 embroidered works—the project’s almost complete archive to date, with the exception of three embroideries currently on view in Norway. The interior walls of the installation are entirely covered with these stitched testimonies. Rather than encountering individual stories one by one, visitors are first confronted with the overwhelming scale of the work, making the magnitude of both political repression and international solidarity almost physically tangible.

The hundreds of embroideries cease to function as individual artworks and instead become a single landscape of collective memory, where personal histories converge into a shared narrative. The recent digitization of the archive further extends the installation beyond the exhibition space: an embroidered QR code directs visitors to the project’s online platform, where each portrait is accompanied by photographs and the stories of both the political prisoner it represents and the participant who created it.

The inclusion of #FramedInBelarus in Necessary Wishes perfectly embodies the biennale’s curatorial premise. Rufina Bazlova’s work demonstrates how art can emerge from political and ethical necessity, transforming a traditional craft into a contemporary language of resistance, care, and participation. Here, embroidery is far more than a medium of artistic expression—it becomes a tangible act of solidarity capable of building transnational communities, preserving historical memory, and resisting the erasure imposed by authoritarian power.

#FramedInBelarus is supported by the ArtPower Belarus programme and funded by the European Union.