Фота: shabohin.org
The SURVIVAL Art Review, taking place in Wroclaw from June 26 to 30, presents contemporary art in an unconventional setting. Among this year’s participants is Belarusian artist Siarhei Shabohin, who has unveiled the total installation Practices of Subordination: Classroom (2026), created specifically for the festival.
First held in 2003, the festival opens to the public spaces that are usually inaccessible. Former factories, hospitals, and other abandoned corners of the city are transformed into venues for contemporary art for several days.
This year, the festival’s general partner is the Wroclaw Medical University, while the venue is the former Clinic of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases.
Shabohin is presenting works from his ongoing cycle Practices of Subordination. The project is a total research archive that examines the ways power penetrates everyday life through fear, control, and routine actions.
The archive consists of thousands of found and created objects, images, texts, and sounds collected in Belarus since 2010. It functions simultaneously as an artist’s museum and a living cartography of subordination. Ordinary objects become evidence of disciplinary ideological systems that shape the human body, cities, and collective memory.
Shabohin’s installation transforms a medical classroom in the former psychiatric and neurological clinic into an ideological learning environment. A space once intended for teaching medicine becomes an ideological classroom where visitors encounter the anatomy of subordination as a system requiring study, interpretation, and almost clinical diagnosis.
The installation uses the existing architecture as one of its primary materials. Yellow-beige walls, parquet flooring, columns, radiators, light switches, exposed wiring, lamps, a sink, curtains, dust, cobwebs, and traces of abandonment all become integral components of the work.
At the entrance, visitors encounter a 2015 archival map consisting of 70 separate sheets displayed beneath museum-grade anti-reflective glass. It functions simultaneously as a document, diagram, assessment, and museum artifact, establishing the conceptual foundation of the installation.
Inside the classroom, nine desks with paired chairs form a strict pedagogical structure. Each desk contains two archival folders, together representing all 18 parts of the cycle.
Visitors become observers, students, witnesses, and participants in reading the archive.
A gray projection screen replacing the classroom blackboard displays the video work Practices of Subordination: Score, which sequentially presents all 18 sections of the cycle, transforming the archival map into an audiovisual composition. The sound composition by Krystaf Ahirman enters into an analytical dialogue with the archive, employing repetitive sound structures and thematic acoustic markers that turn the classification system into an indicator of power. The archive functions simultaneously as a repository of evidence and as a mechanism of reproduction, inviting viewers to read, listen, perform, study, and reconsider its structures.
The project explores Belarusian state ideology through urban environments, rituals, fear, the body, bureaucracy, architecture, and everyday gestures. Minsk, Navapolatsk, and other cities emerge as fragments of disciplinary cartography, where power materializes through objects, diagrams, slogans, documents, sounds, and repetitive behavioral patterns. Everyday objects become evidence, while the archive serves as a tool for uncovering structures embedded in daily life.
The cycle, launched in 2010, has gained particular relevance in the context of 2026. Sixteen years of collecting, documenting, and systematizing evidence of subordination reveal the continuous transformation, intensification, and expansion of the system. Earlier sections of the project now resemble a diagnosis of a prolonged political pathology. The installation archives the past while simultaneously documenting the crisis of the present. A system of power based on fear, control, and self-discipline continually postpones its own collapse through ever more intensive forms of disciplinary pressure.
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The theme of this year’s SURVIVAL festival is Finger on the Heart. The curatorial team — Michal Binek, Daniel Brozak, Malgorzata Misniakiewicz, and Ewa Pluta — explain that the image of the “finger on the heart” emerged at the intersection of science, violence, and ignorance. The theme is inspired by a plaster cast of the finger of legendary Wroclaw cardiac surgeon Wiktor Bross, whose research and pioneering operations were carried out in the clinic. In 1955, Bross began using his finger to dilate a patient’s mitral valve during open-heart surgery. The cast records the precise depth to which the finger had to be inserted into the left ventricle to achieve the desired valve opening. As such, it is both a medical instrument—for accurately measuring the anatomy of a specific individual—and a unique scientific relic. Today, the abandoned buildings of the clinic, where groundbreaking therapeutic methods were once developed and generations of doctors were trained, stand as silent witnesses to the inevitable obsolescence of knowledge.
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