Masha Maroz
area: Applied Art
Key Facts
nationality
Belarusarea
Applied Artresidence
Minskrecommending institution
BMEIAtime period
September 2025 - October 2025Masha 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.
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).
On 22.10.25, Masha Maroz will also present her book "Long Way Home" at Buchhandlung Walther König —a collection of texts and images exploring the archaic culture of the Palessie region (in southwestern Belarus).