Gaude Polonia programme is addressed to young artists and cultural workers, as well as translators of Polish literature from the Central and Eastern Europe countries, primarily from Belarus and Ukraine. The program is dedicated to building a common surface of understanding and exchange of contacts in the field of cultural cooperation between Poland and its neighbouring countries.
Olga Klip is an art curator and gallerist based in Minsk, Belarus. She has a Master's degree in Visual and Cultural Studies and a second Master's degree in Art History. She studied art history and theory at the St. Petersburt State University, art criticism at the European Humanities University in Minsk and Vilnius, and museum studies at Ecole du Louvre in Paris. Olga Klip worked at the National Art Museum in Minsk for 6 years, curated the Belgazprombank corporate collection, she has been managing and curating a contemporary art gallery in Minsk since 2016 and has been making independent curatorial projects since 2013 in museums in Belarus and Russia. One of her major projects is devoted to underestimated artists and audience development where according to the idea each and every artist can take part in an exhibition with one artwork of his/her choice (яяя.бел). She has four kids – one girl and three boys aged from 1 to 10.
Olga Klip about her curatorial residency project:
"Never choose a political party. Choose art"
(from "Never Look Away" Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
Protests in Minsk in August 2020, sleepless nights in thoughts about my friends and relatives in jail and surfing the web led me to the "Construction in Process" – an art project that took place in Lodz in 1981 for the first time. The circumstances under which the project took place back then seemed to me very similar to the situation in contemporary Belarus, and I had this idea to develop a new "Construction in Process" in Minsk, forty years after the first edition. Following the idea of "Construction in Process" , I have in mind to invite a big group of artists from around the world to make their art in Minsk and/or other locations in Belarus. It is quite a challenge to perform under political pressure. Yet, it is not about politicised art, rather about making art for the sake of art in the situation of total political absurdity.
I have a certain passion for artistic projects with many participants, both artists and spectators. Perhaps, it is a very ambitious idea to make, say, 50 leading artists develop their artistic works in Minsk today, but this concept worked out once in Lodz and it is worth trying in Minsk. Anyway, I am going to discover how the "Construction in Process" was possible in Lodz-1981, and I will look for ways to this idea in Minsk-2021.