Uladzimir Hramovich

Ghosts, 2018

Digital collages

In this series of works the artist refers to the postwar destruction and modern landscapes of Minsk, problematizing the official canon of historical memory through the mythology and the “specter” of defeated fascism. Hramovich uses graphic elements of anti-fascist caricatures of Belorussian artists from the wartime publication “We Will Crush The Fascist Viper”. These nondescript elements, removed from the context  – the trajectory of the battle shell’s flight, the fragments of explosions and fragments of bodies, the hulls of the downed planes – remind us of the fear of destruction, of the ruins of Minsk. Uladzimir Hramovich binds together the history of architecture and art with the city’s transformation and the representation of space. Working with the multilayered post-Soviet city, Hramovich asks a question: what does the landscape conceal, what do the ruins conceal, what is hiding behind the building site’s fence.

Uladzimir Hramovich lives and works in Minsk. He graduated from Art College named after I. V. Akhremchik in Minsk in 2009 and from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts in 2015. Hramovich participated in exhibitions in Minsk, Moscow, Vilnius and other cities. He had his first solo exhibition in Wrocław and participated in the V Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2017. Hramovich examines historical memory, architecture and the influence that politics has on art and material.