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Aleksiada

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/Aleksander Weledzimowicz
opening: March 17th 2017(Friday), 6 pm – 8 pm
the exhibition will be open until May 28th, 2017

The “Aleksiada” project was created in 2016 thanks to the “Gaude Polonia” scholarship that was granted  to the Belarusian photographer Aleksander Weledzimowicz by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. By that means a book that was the origin of the exhibition was created. A unique project was created as well, in which the phenomenon of memory, not history, is the keystone. The historical events – the war odyssey of the artist’s great-grandfather , the battle route leading from the USSR to Warsaw, are the starting point. The story told many times to the grandson, processed in the form of joint games, became a tale with his grandfather – a hero of children’s imagination – in the foreground.  Actual events have been inextricably intertwined with the child’s emotions, historical truth has undergone transformation. The journey that Alexander Weledzimowicz made in 2016 was not about verifying war stories therefore the account of this journey – the eponymous “Aleksiada” – is rather a chronicle, in which facts and child’s imagination take equal place. Here, adventure is more important – a category that originates rather from the world of pirates, from games and comic books, from adventure books rather than from historical chronicles. The story about the heroism is based on the facts but they do not shape the protagonist’s phenomenon. Although historical photographs and maps create the frame of the story, the equal place is occupied by sources that cannot be found in a historian’s study such as postcards, anonymous photographs loosely related to the main topic with context only, children’s drawings, and screenshots from war video games.

Aleksander Weledzimowicz
was born in 1983 in Vitebsk (Belarus) and lives there to this date. He has been working as a professional photographer since 2007. From 2010 to 2013 he was teaching at the Minsk School of Photography, he was also a co-creator of the youth initiative “Vitebsk Photography Workshops”. In 2016 he was granted the “Gaude Polonia” scholarship by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage that allowed him to carry out the artistic project and publish the book “Aleksiada”. He is a member of the Belarusian Association of Photographers. His works have been exhibited in Vitebsk, Minsk, Brest, Paris, Vancouver, Krasnodar, and Tashkent. Some of them are parts of the private collections in Belarus, France, Germany, and the United States.