In a studio on a quiet residential street in west Warsaw, a group of former political prisoners is cutting golden wheat stalks to 90 centimeters and stacking them, ready to be shipped to the Venice Biennale. A giant ball made of books banned in neighboring Belarus—Harry Potter, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an illustrated history of kink—rests on the claw of a bulldozer. Laughter, organ music, and the sound of an angle grinder fill the air as surveillance cameras are attached to a towering iron crucifix.
This is Official. Unofficial. Belarus., the first major art project by the Belarus Free Theatre (BFT). Unusually, this work by the exiled troupe has no performance element. Instead, it has been created by painters, sculptors, composers, and even the man recently voted the world’s best chef. Rasmus Munk has been developing a dish at his two-Michelin-star restaurant in Copenhagen that will taste like detention under an authoritarian regime—the theme of the entire installation. A custom scent has also been commissioned: it will smell like a freshly dug grave in the Belarus countryside in late August, covered with rotting flowers.
If this all sounds incredibly ambitious, the co-founders of BFT would be the first to agree. Natalia Kaliada and her husband Nicolai Khalezin, based in London since 2011, have produced some of the most challenging political theatre in recent years—from Being Harold Pinter in 2007 to the Olivier-nominated opera King Stakh’s Wild Hunt. But they never dreamed of staging an exhibition. Actually, that’s not quite true, says Khalezin. A former curator, he wanted to represent Belarus at Venice decades ago, but “the government told me, ‘Here are the artists you can choose from.’” Since 1994, his homeland has been controlled by dictator and Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko, who stole the last two elections and has imprisoned thousands of opponents.
Instead, their daughter Daniella Kaliada has led this project. Today, she walks around the iron crucifix in a baseball cap and loafers, making adjustments. The surveillance cameras were bought new but are being sanded to look weathered. Painter Sergey Grinevich shows her a new addition—a smear of green and white paint meant to look like seagull droppings. Daniella thinks it’s too much and wipes it off. At 26, she is getting used to managing artists who are older and more stubborn than her.
That includes her mother. My day starts at one of the Kaliadas’ favorite Belarusian cafes in Warsaw, where yellow mimosa hangs from the ceiling and the room is noisy with exiles. Natalia wants me to try syrniki, sweet cottage cheese pancakes, but Daniella makes a face: “I absolutely hate them.” She feels the same way about theatre. “There’s always a risk,” she explains, “that a story is being pushed on you. With visual art, each person creates their own.”
Mother and daughter are strikingly similar—emphatic, warm, and razor-sharp—and they disagree on everything: how best to motivate a team, the right amount of rust on metal, where to stand for the Guardian’s photos. “But we agree on quality,” smiles Natalia. “How we fight behind the scenes, how many nights we cry? Nobody cares.”
Daniella was first interrogated by the Belarusian KGB when she was eight, and she clearly remembers the day her mother was arrested at a protest in 2010. “Nikolai was at home, and the doorbell rang at 5 a.m. I looked through the peephole and saw six men wearing masks. We sat in the house for six hours, with the doorbell ringing nonstop, our dog barking, and the phone ringing. When it stopped, the silence was deafening.”
Natalia was held for 20 hours and threatened with rape. “You go numb,” she says, “because the worst part is having no control.” Friends were jailed for months.Years ago, the husband of Daniella’s godmother was kidnapped and killed. “In jail, you don’t understand what will happen. And in that moment, your brain freezes.”
Russia’s pavilion at the biennale shows the failure of international law. Official. Unofficial. Belarus will try to capture both experiences: the numbness of those detained and the fear of those left behind. They also want to make a broader point about digital limits on personal freedoms. “Belarus is a unique authoritarian mix,” says Daniella, “but we can all relate to the idea of surveillance.” Her mother adds: “In Belarus, I could go with friends to talk in the woods and leave my phone. Now it doesn’t matter if you leave your phone – there will be drones. There’s no place for a person to be safe.”
As the title suggests, their Venice installation isn’t an official pavilion but a “collateral event” at the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista, because pavilions have to be requested by a ministry of culture. This year, for the first time since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has an official pavilion. “It’s a failure of international law and institutions,” says Natalia. “It’s tied to the world’s failure on Ukraine. Who is being legitimized? When the state says, ‘The pavilion is coming,’ it means the machinery is coming, the money is coming.”
Russia’s pavilion is curated by Anastasia Karneeva, who runs an art consultancy with the daughter of foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. Her father is an executive at Rostec, Russia’s biggest defense contractor. “It’s connected to the state at the highest levels,” says Daniella. The Kaliadas hope the pavilion will become a focus for protest – Pussy Riot are promising a takeover – and lead to a review of the biennale’s rules. “To allow any country to participate, regardless of politics, is outdated,” says Daniella. “If the Olympics can change, why not the biennale?”
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‘Evil lives very close by’ … composer Olga Podgaiskaya and her husband with Natalia Kaliada. Photograph: Anna Liminowicz/The Guardian
We drive to St Alexander’s, a Catholic church popular with Belarusians that sits on an island in the traffic. Composer Olga Podgaiskaya compares it to Noah’s ark: “In the summer,” she says, “people sit on the floor and it feels like we’re this circle of people who have survived something.” From the upper gallery, she plays the organ piece she has composed for Venice: a 20-minute sequence of alarms, crescendos, and silences.
Last November, Podgaiskaya’s husband was kidnapped on a visit to Belarus, detained for 15 days, and tortured. “I wanted to scream,” she says. “But when someone goes to jail, you can’t be loud because they get beaten up.” She hopes people can hear that trauma in her piece, which is “a reminder that evil lives very close by. I also hope the government people who are watching us constantly – I hope I might heal them a little.” Are the KGB among her audience? “Of course,” says Daniella, who has been translating. “We’re very close to the border. If you think we’re not being followed – well, we are.”
As we drive to the studio, I talk to Khalezin, who has flown in for the day, wearing a stylish white overcoat and carrying flowers for his wife. The ball of books is his. “It’s a retelling of the Sisyphus story,” he explains. “The ball has fallen from the mountain and crushed the arm of a bulldozer. Because when books are banned in Belarus, they are shredded and buried in the ground.”
Khalezin also hosts a YouTube cooking show, each week urging Belarusian viewers – joining via VPNs – to watch, then delete and unsubscribe. One recent guest was Stephen Fry. Another was Rasmus Munk, who later tells me his Venice contribution will take the form of…The final version was a communion wafer, meant to be served at the church venue. Twenty versions were rejected for being too sweet or too crunchy. “The one Natalia and Daniella associated with a lack of hope dissolved instantly,” Munk says. “It’s flavored with a bud from the ‘toothache plant’ that leaves a numbing sensation, like Sichuan pepper.” He colored it the gray of the Belarusian army uniform.
At the studio, Grinevich is working on two large canvases. One shows a row of naked figures crouching or praying; the other depicts a crowd of young men in masks, very similar to what Daniella saw through her peephole. Between them leans a painting of a wheat field, which will hang near a 3D version made from stacked stems. “It will be very orderly, very lifeless,” says Daniella. Above it, they will hang “straw spiders,” a Belarusian take on dream-catchers, made from prison bars by artist Vladimir Tsesler.
Grinevich left Belarus to be here and may never go back. “I stand to lose a lot,” he says. “My workshop, 500 artworks, the beautiful house I built.” He studied for 12 years in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, specializing in monumental art, and points to the country’s strong tradition of exiled painters: Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, and Nadia Léger, wife of Fernand. Before Lukashenko’s rule, Grinevich painted Soviet propaganda—portraits of Lenin and murals for army buildings. He says today’s state art is “over-sexualized and amateurish,” marked by its devotion to power rather than skill.
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‘I stand to lose a lot’ … Obedience by Sergey Grinevich. Photograph: Anna Liminowicz/The Guardian
Still, he’s open to direction: Daniella wants him to adjust the masked men so they resemble other security forces, like America’s ICE agents, and to make them less specifically Belarusian. “Our ICE agents don’t look scary,” she says. “They’re young, handsome men from the countryside.”
Earlier, Natalia gently scolded her daughter for being impatient with the older artists, including herself—but the installation might not exist without the boldness of youth. “When a 26-year-old decides to curate a major pavilion,” her mother says, “I ask her, ‘Why do you want to deal with art and politics? Stay away!’ And she says, ‘No, I have to, because younger generations need to stand up.’ It’s about what we do now to have a future.”
Belarus is no longer home, Natalia says, but a collection of memories—her mother’s pancakes, walks in the woods. Their apartment was seized after they left, and friends had to delete any trace of contact with them. Natalia doesn’t think about the personal risks—”I can’t spend my energy running”—preferring to focus on art. Next up is an opera based on The Elephant, a satire about repression by Belarusian novelist Sasha Filipenko, in which an actual elephant appears in every home in the country.
Natalia wishes the status of Russia and Belarus at the biennale were reversed, that the Russians had to jump through hoops to be there. But the effort of staging this project has shown her how powerful her people are in exile: more than half of it has been funded, anonymously, by Belarusian businesses.
It feels especially important at a time when borders everywhere are tightening, she says, adding that the fear instilled by an authoritarian regime takes a long time to fade, if it ever does. “That if someone knocks on the door, it means I or Nicolai will be arrested. Daniella told me a couple of years ago, on a walk in Hyde Park, ‘It’s only now that I’m slowly getting rid of that.'”
Official. Unofficial. Belarus. is at Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista at the Venice Biennale, 9 May – 22 November. This article was amended on 28 April 2026. The Olivier-winning opera from the Belarus Free Theatre is King Stakh’s Wild Hunt. A previous version referred to it incorrectly.I mistakenly responded to “Dogs of Europe,” which is a play by the Belarus Free Theatre.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the news about Belarus Free Theatre at the Venice Biennale written in a natural conversational tone
BeginnerLevel Questions
Q What is the Belarus Free Theatre
A Its a famous awardwinning theatre group from Belarus They are known for creating powerful political plays that criticize the authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenko Because of this they were forced to go into exile and now perform all over the world
Q What does The doorbell rang at 5 am Six masked men were outside mean
A Thats the title of their new performance It describes a terrifying reallife experience common in Belarus secret police raiding peoples homes in the middle of the night It sets the scene for the fear and terror they are portraying
Q What is the Venice Biennale
A Its one of the worlds most important and prestigious art and culture festivals held every two years in Venice Italy Its a huge stage for artists and performers from around the globe
Q Why is this performance at the Venice Biennale a big deal
A Its a massive platform The Biennale gives the Belarus Free Theatre a global spotlight to tell the world about the brutal reality of living under a dictatorship It makes it harder for the world to ignore whats happening in Belarus
Q Is this a traditional play with a stage and actors
A Likely not The Belarus Free Theatre is famous for using immersive shocking and nontraditional methods Their performances often put the audience right in the middle of the action to make them feel the fear and oppression
AdvancedLevel Questions
Q How does this performance specifically address the concept of totalitarianism
A It doesnt just talk about it it recreates the feeling of it By using the title about a dawn raid they immediately tap into the states control over private life the constant surveillance and the sudden violent intrusion of the police into a citizens home It makes the abstract idea of totalitarianism a visceral terrifying experience
Q What practical artistic techniques does the theatre use to create this sense of terror
A They often use techniques like
