Masha Maroz

Empty exhibition room with green table and art object in front of white wall, reflection on glass wall to the left.

Arrangement of metal spoons on a green surface forming a circle around a charred wick standing in the center with additional scattered spoons in the background.

Head and upper body of a doll with its head covered by a colorful patterned scarf wrapped with a white cloth.

Several people wearing traditional clothing with headscarves walk along a narrow path through a dense forest.

Several brown almonds lie on a gray surface inside a green, tilted square marked with the numbers 4 and 5 at the corners.

Key Facts

Nationality: Belarus
Area: Applied Art
Place of residence: Minsk
Recommending Institution: BMEIA
Period: September – October 2025
Links: @mashamaroz
@past__perfect__
@long__way__home__

Masha Maroz is an interdisciplinary artist, ethnographer and designer (born 1991) based in Minsk (Belarus). She graduated from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts (2014) as a costume designer. She reflects on the connection between mythology, collective memory and vitality.In her artistic and scientific work, Masha Maroz examines the historical Belarusian context through the lens of the synthesis between archaic forms and technologies, starting from the idea of activating the transformative potential of traditional culture in the prevailing socio-political matrix.
Maroz is the founder and curator of the Past Perfect platform, which is dedicated to preserving the ethnographic heritage of Belarus. Expeditions to the Palessie region are an important part of her research. She uses a wide range of media and forms to develop her artistic language, including installations, textiles, videos, photographs, graphics and physical objects. She is the author and editor of “Lоng Way Home,“ which will be published in December 2024.

Project info

During her residency at MQ Masha Maroz is going to work on a new analogue graphic series addressing to the notion of sacred time in archaic mythology and ethnoreligious worldview of her ancestral tribes from Belarusian Palessie.
With a deep interest in modes of cyclicity and renewal she sees the decoding of ancient knowledge of cosmogonies as a meaningful tool for influencing everyday social reality and reflects on how the human being is sought to understand and describe the world, going within and beyond.
From the very beginning cryptography remained the one possible language that keeps the tension between the evident and hidden, rational and mystic. Grounded on on this method of encryption in the upcoming series of graphic works Maroz would refer to different levels of interaction with forces that cannot be captured in rational forms of knowledge, but are the cause and condition for the existence of all forms of life.

Masha Maroz is guest at MQ AiR Program supported by the Austrian Foreign Ministry (BMEIA).