Vasilisa Palianina

Vasilisa Palianina (born 1986 in Minsk, Belarus) graduated from the Art Department of the Belarusian State University in the Design Faculty in 2009.The artist participated in various residencies, including: Gaude Polonia scholarship program, Warsaw, Poland (2019), Slavs and Tatars art group. Pickle Bar, Berlin, Germany, MRI, Akademie der Künste, Germany (2022-2023).Since 2018 she is a member of the art group "Who Except Us" (the duo with Andrey Anro).Palianina has presented three solo and more than twenty group exhibitions and participated in the following art fairsBlazar Young Art Fair / Museum of Moscow / Moscow, Russia (2020) and Viennacontemporary / Vienna, Austria (2020 and 2021). The artist works with themes of sexual and gender identity, human and animal origins, as well as social and political aspects through mythology. She works in the fields of graphics, installation, performance and mixed media. Her works can be found in private collections in Belarus, Poland, USA, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and Russia.

During her residency at MQ, Vasilisa Palianina will be exploring her work “The Mother of Flowers” (cotton, embroidery). In August 2020, women dressed in white took to the streets of Belarus with flowers in their hands to protest against government violence and lies. The first action took place spontaneously on the market square in Minsk. The event became a symbol of non-violent resistance and was repeated in various forms every week for the rest of the year. The flower thus became a symbol of confrontation. The return to the cultural tradition of embroidery is a modern women's issue that is on the agenda in Belarus today. There are things that inevitably disappear from Belarusian culture. For example, the tradition of homespun bedspreads and carpets practically died out with the gradual disappearance of the homespun loom. But despite the fact that it has practically ceased to exist, the symbolism of weaving has been preserved, and the artist, as the bearer of the cultural code, recreates this symbolism in the ritual of group embroidery.