Jan Bassalyga & Arina Grinevich: The Store of Personalities

Jan Bassalyga & Arina Grinevich
The Store of Personalities
Opening together with other MQ Showrooms: 11.09.2024, 18h
12.09. – 29.09.2024 | MQ Pop-Up Schauraum
Free entry!

In ‘The Store of Personalities’, Jan Bassalyga and Arina Grinevich deal with the effects of war and emigration and the constant endeavour to preserve the spirit of humanity amidst all the turbulence of a warlike conflict and the experience of expulsion from one's homeland.
Jan Bassalyga's porcelain works are based on so-called war masks. In real life, these are facial prosthetics that cover lost or destroyed parts of the face of war invalids; for the artist, they are a metaphor for the emotional scars and invisible wounds that the conflict leaves behind in all those affected.
Arina Grinevich sees her ‘Performances of Emigration’ as living sculptures in which the human body becomes a canvas that thematises the journey and search for identity and belonging of those who have left their homeland in the hope of a new beginning.
The connecting threads and concepts of the project are resilience and transformation, which are at the centre of both projects. Bassalyga's masks and Grinevich's performances overlap in their exploration of how individuals and communities cope with and survive the upheavals of war and displacement. The exhibition invites observers to reflect on the personal and collective resilience that defines the human condition in the face of adversity.
The exhibition thus becomes a dialogue between ceramics and performance, between static objects and dynamic actions, each reflecting the strength and fragility of the human spirit.
Both artists are from Belarus, Jan Bassalyga was a participant in the MuseumsQuartier Artist-in-Residence programme in May and June this year. He was nominated for the programme by Arina Grinevich. Arina Grinevich (born 2002 in Minsk) is studying in Anna Jermolaewa's class at the University of Art and Design Linz. Performances and film play an important role in her work. Jan Bassalyga (born 2005 in Minsk) is a sculptor who was expelled from the Academy of Arts in Minsk, where he had studied in the sculpture class, due to his stay in Vienna. He had to leave his work behind in Vienna for fear of repression in his home country. After losing his place at the academy, he now works as a freelance artist in Minsk, Belarus.
The project is carried out in cooperation with the Austrian Foreign Ministry (BMEIA), with which the MuseumsQuartier has been particularly focused on inviting artists from Belarus to Vienna since 2021.
This exhibition is intended as a sign of solidarity towards independent artists from Belarus.