Belcult: Experiments in the (im)possible

Maxim Zhbankov

Summary

The 2025 version of Belarusian culture (Belcult) marked a new phase in post-revolutionary transformation — shifting from a traumatic, depressive stage of emergency flight and migrant nostalgia toward a “new normal” of conventionally stable existence in a foreign land. Expat creativity fully abandoned illusions of a swift return to the country of origin and focused on adapting to a new cultural landscape. This inevitably leads to the emergence of unique hybrid projects — collaborations with actors of the host country, games with local cultural codes, and multicultural experiments.

In a context marked by a clear absence of state social and financial support from Belarus, compounded by political uncertainty and inconsistent donor assistance, Belcult is focused on survival strategies. It adopts a core matrix grounded in multilingualism, formal open-mindedness, mental candor, and a fundamentally nonlinear view of creative development. Through this process, it is experimentally embracing new cultural experiences along with the understanding of Belarusian identity in new dimensions.

Trends

Restart and replay: a hundred Shades of the nation

The year 2025 did not see a breakthrough for divided and fragmented Belarusian culture. The absolute majority of notable cultural products revealed their fundamental secondariness, inertia of content, and a clear reliance on ethnocentric interpretations of national identity, along with a time-proved, cautious stylistic convention. The prevailing trend is the comfortable repetition of recognizable models: patriotic choral exercises (spanning from Volny Khor to Siarzhuk Douhushau’s new Kasary male singing project), familiar club ethnic electronica by Shuma, protest-oriented victim theater, mocking chanson by RSP and Sergey Pukst, dark-pop post-punk by Molchat Doma and Nurnberg, trauma-focused egocentric poetry, depressive-repressive prose, and prison chronicles.

The primary strategies in individual artistic practice were three divergent approaches: pragmatic Euro-conformity (contextual adaptation), niche startups, and sole proprietorships (small-scale businesses operating independently), and radical grassroots creativity (niche autonomy).

In the first scenario, the emphasis is on aligning expat Belarusian creativity as closely as possible with the standards and norms of the European culture market. One example of problem integration into local themes was the Free Theatre’s Warsaw performance Urząd Przyjemności — a street theater-style migrant legalize drama. Olga Mzhelskaya, through her online project, adapts the expatriate audience to current trends in Polish art.

In the second case, targeted commercial activities are directed at a narrow migrant audience. This is how independent Belarusian publishers, cafés, brewpubs, reenactment clubs, and bohemian circles operate.

The third scenario includes practices of aesthetic underground and cultural resistance — reproduced both within Belarus and abroad — where the tradition of Western nonconformism resonates with an unfinished project of Belarusian (auto)identity. Underground activists from the Nadja initiative published a collection of works by André Breton, René Char, and Paul Éluard titled Slow under Construction. Prague-based Max Shchur, in his two-volume memoir An Attempt at Experimental Self-Construction, explores the emergence of a European intellectual within a Belarusian outsider.

The future of Belcult raises questions about the compatibility of various versions of our authenticity with the space for creative work that has drastically changed recently.

Survival stories, again: chronicles of the “displaced”

Last year can also be interpreted as the time of a definitive farewell to illusions of rapid victory. Replacing the protest émigré mainstream were experiments in integration and adaptation — acts of Europeanization of creative efforts. Three fundamental ideas: (a) we are outside Belarus seriously and for the long haul, (b) Belcult can only survive by accepting and internalizing the cultural norms of the host country, (c) ethnocentric Belarusian identity is becoming a speculative construct — with an inevitable shift toward a softer mode of cultural minorities and diaspora activism in the foreseeable future.

The prospects for cultivating a new, distinct national culture today appear particularly challenging. The previous tension between the quasi-Soviet imperial industry of illusions, the commercial national pop culture, and the underground scene since 2020 has been intensified by the story of radical resource transfer — mass emergency migration gradually developing into long-term cultural expansion into neighboring countries. Meanwhile, the mission of constructing a free Belarus has transformed into tactics of patchwork professional survival for expatriates. This signifies a final step out of the comfort zone of the late 2010s guerilla culture into the reality of “displaced persons” — activism adapted to foreign rules and accompanied by an inevitable loss of status.

Essentially, this is about expanding practices of adaptations and remixes aimed at transforming them into the “new normal” of Belcult — a convention of residence registration, fluidity of concepts, and mental traffic crossing borders and traditions.

Statehood is temporarily put aside. There is neither space nor partners for cultural policy. The inertia of alternative collides with the inertia of order. In terms of idea monotony, superficial journalism, banal visuals, exaggerated acting, and promotions through state resources, pictures like Belarusfilm’s Klassnaya (by Kirill Khaltetsky, one of the season’s few premieres) and the Polish Pod szarym niebem by Mara Tamkovich appear equally dull — and equally insignificant.

The process goes on, but this signifies little. Resonance is driven by scandals rather than by breakthroughs. Genuine attempts by the Polish side to figure out1 the fuss around Max Korzh’s Warsaw stadium concert were overshadowed by a wave of anxious posts following the expulsion of the most disorderly fans.2 The popular Berlin-based blogger Kolya Sulima triggered a wave of emotional reactions with his fleeting remarks about a brief visit to Minsk, rather than his debut collection of essays.3

Noise and distractions: the new No Style

The notion of No Style that we coined as a hallmark of the 2000s, has unexpectedly regained relevance. The horizon of senses is shattered; the vector of direction is lost. Integral style is replaced with memes and superficial pop attractions. Online wrangles generate information noise that regulates collective mood and effectively displaces critical thinking.

Belcult — in all its manifestations — continues to engage in visionary exercises. Regardless of specific location, party affiliation, or ideological orientation, it eagerly produces formal structures, culture bureaucrats, patchwork activism, fragmented expertise, pseudo-leaders, semantic inertia, and internal conflicts.

Devoid of internal development resources foreign-based Belcult projects operate as low-budget startups and short-lived subsidized events. The absence of “long money” (sustainable, long-term funding) in the migrant cultural landscape renders its existence perpetually unstable, its influence and social weight highly conditional, and its growth prospects extremely challenging.

The very fact of functioning in a poorly predictable “guest” mode transforms Belarusian cultural activism into a dubious endeavor of uncertain purpose — a hybrid of small business, political service, and retreat for refugees. In this setup, there’s no room for a powerful subject, and consequently, no powerful texts are generated.

Need a term for this? Let’s call it new stagnation — a voicing of space without meaningful shifts.

The factor of pause: new newsworthiness

The year 2025 was marked by four prominent signals: Donald Trump’s sharp overhaul of the U.S. support programs (including the one focusing on culture); the minimalist Berlinale breakthrough of Yuri Semashko’s The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov; the makeshift lyricism of “incredible” Nastya Rahatko’s Carry It With You; and the wide release of Mara Tamkovich’s heroic melodrama Pod szarym niebem (2024). A four-bar play: fail, frenzy, pop, and smug. As a result, essential levels of relevant cultural flows within (post)Belcult became apparent: administrative pragmatism, melancholic grassroots “otherness,” light auto-design, and clumsy agitprop. These are already markers of the times — new broadcast jingles for a new era.

Belcult-2025 is actively inventing its past, present, and future. It’s a school of nomads — marching fugitives, partisans, dandies, and freelancers. For this school, there is no single cultural canon, no unified cultural policy, and no obvious formulas for success.

The traffic of Belarusian identity, fragmented across locations, countries, low-cost airlines, currency areas, and time zones, is culturally conditioned, stylistically chaotic, and persistently unstable. Nevertheless, within the field of post-revolutionary cultural activism, two primary vectors can be identified — outside and inside — that can functionally be divided into four main tracks.

Outside (Belcult operating abroad), the core role belongs to the conversion of the trauma caused by incomplete transition. This involves two tracks of cultural work: status adaptation to European standards (churning out Euro-Belarusians) and nostalgic national design (an emotional refuge for lost souls). In the first, talents are trained for local creative resources; in the second, another diaspora is formed with sentimental ties to the lost homeland. In other words, a daily Tutaka fest.

Inside (within Belarus), civic activism is almost entirely eliminated; informal public activity is punishable, and cultural policy is invariably replaced by police operations. For example, in June 2025, Aleh Khamenka, leader of the ‘Palats’ band, was detained and later sentenced to three years under a criminal article. Materials posted by the social media groups Dzieciuki and Brutto were labeled as extremist.

Shadow creativity and identity transformations remain the dominant vectors. Consequently, there are two primary tracks of internal cultural work: the preservation and reproduction of “another culture,” and the naive creativity of the “post-barricade generation” — fresh twenty-year-olds who are building their cultural patterns from scratch on their homeland scarred by protests and repression. For them, post-election terror is a distant memory; relatives who left are just a face on a tablet; censored memories are nothing extraordinary; and the skill of being invisible is a chance to survive and make a difference.

This new generation missed the “golden age” of national romanticism and was late to witness the revolution of advertisers. They generally do not share a collective trauma but follow an individual choreography. They gauge their culture by their ability to be non-publicly public while staying meaningful. They arrive quietly, perform briefly, and leave without repercussions.

To complete the picture, add situational alliances of diverse culture groups, noise broadcasting by subsidized culture industry (grouped around Belarusian state elites), and creative consumerist practices of grassroots profane culture, which operate through spontaneous bricolage of meaningful fragments borrowed from the surrounding environment.

The conformable are getting loud. The freak-pop band Cassiopeia returned with the album Bipolar Star — a collection of punchy versatile tracks. Russia’s heavy artillery band ‘Ruki Vverh!’ sold out Minsk Arena stadium three times in a row.

What’s the takeaway? At least four different versions of cultural residence and creative setting. Four distinct worlds in the desert of native thistle.

Protocols and responses

However, this approach only captures already established and relatively finished forms. The true dynamics of culture remain beyond the scope of analysis — practices of transformation, processes rather than final outcomes.

For fugitives and outsiders, the reference point here is Yuri Semashko’s debut feature The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov, produced by the BFN micro-budget film incubator. A curious mixture of early Jarmusch, Soviet alternative cinema, emigrant spleen, and ancient mythology, Semashko’s film quite convincingly functions as a program manifesto for new Belcult. It showcases an effective model of screenwriting with a punk slogan: “Less is more.”

Once again, Free Theatre engaged with a topical agenda, delivering a conversational, basketball, political, and lesbian-themed show KS6: Small Forward, featuring a solo appearance by Belarusian sports megastar Katsiaryna Snytsina. The tightly woven spectacle tosses the audience like a ball into the basket. The question remains: what is art here, and what is manipulative programming?

The lineup of notable hybrid projects included the Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian performance Where are you going, Wolf? by the InexKult Multilingualism on Stage creative laboratory (directed by Monika Dobrowlańska) and the Yiddish Verses musical project: seven contemporary Belarusian artists sing poems written in Yiddish in the first half of the 20th century. In August, Warsaw played host to the Nyamaya Lihamanka festival, featuring four silent films (including the Belarusian Prostitute) with live accompaniment by Belarusian and Polish chamber musicians.

The band Syndrom Samazvanca’s new album, Mahajba, sounds like an old-school psychedelic band from the 1960s — but infused with Belarusian authenticity, Polish club culture, and Okrestina detention center experiences. The frontwoman of the emerging avant-pop scene, Nasta Rydlevskaya, provocatively merged pagan eroticism with decadent baroque exuberance in her music video for Isolde, directed by Madsangria.

Word after words: the advent of post-fiction

Sasha Filipenko’s new novel, Elephant, resembles a simultaneous exhibition, aiming to win on all boards at once. Its central metaphor references absurdist classics — Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. The suffocating atmosphere of a banal nightmare is almost Nabokovian. Flat style, careless writing, and sluggish intonation are typical of the normal Belcult of the 2000s — a regular Victor Martinovich. Carefully crafted creepiness is a tribute to the Russian accent, reminiscent of Vladimir Sorokin. All together (in two language versions) it represents a Belarusian build, transit version.

Among numerous publishing initiatives abroad, Miane Nema stands out — a cross-cultural migrant project with a distinctive designer flair and a wide reach of notable authors — from Sergey Kravchenko and Tatsiana Zamirovskaya to Dmitry Strotsev and Marc Chagall.4

Amid half-decay of Belarusian cultural space, visionaries and storytellers take on special significance — people with a unique repertoire. Debuts and comebacks are particularly important — often embodied within the same person.

Melancholic downshifter Andrus Horvat has surpassed his own clichés in his new book Home, an existential reconstruction of a past that appears in dreams. Rock and roll veteran Lesley Knife published another prose collection, Bilingva. Glamorous TV host Denis Dudinsky made his debut with the novel Patibulum — as if The Dragon by Evgeny Schwartz were retold by Jorge Luis Borges. Artyom Shukanov took on domestic cyberpunk — and, judging by the initial reviews, succeeded with his invention.

There was logically room for those to make sense of all this. In 2025, bellit.info launched Sergey Dubavets’s podcast Literary Notes.5 Reform.news featured a series of analyses titled Gluconate of the Nation6 by Maxim Zhbankov. In October, the same Reform.news embarked on Cultural Re:vision.7 However, high-quality regular cultural critique remains exceedingly scarce.

Bottom line: formulas for growth

The characteristic shifts in post-catastrophic Belcult are quite telling. The first is the de-centering of Belarusian identity — a variable consciousness. The second is the remix of resources — cultural mutations as a habitat of private whims and personal choices. The third is the lack of mechanics to propel all this forward. The typical status of the partisan nation is separateness and dissociation. Belcult is a puzzle that cannot be assembled into a pattern. Each fragment fails to see the others and it self cannot become visible.

We lack a country with functioning institutions, predictable rules of the game, and the capacity for a peaceful transfer of power. How can we build culture then? And what to choose — military drills or cultural freestyle? The blend of systemic slowdown and improv creativity prompts us two possible scenarios for development and the roles of the key actors within them.

The administrative resource of the “new Belarus” culture (as one of the segments of symbolic “management in exile”) can only exist in conjunction with émigré quasi-political structures — and only to the extent that they continue to operate, maintain their status as junior partners within European institutions, and serve as conditional patrons of the “other culture.” The matter of its survival (and emergence) will be determined solely by political circumstances and call for no additional effort or quality shifts in the work of (pseudo)cultural institutions. In other words, for this administrative resource to sustain itself, it is enough simply to remain an administrative resource.

The creative sector is deprived of such insurance and exists in a state of perpetual stress. Risks are higher there. There is no need for state support because it has no state of its own. However, there is demand for clever inputs by the diaspora — adaptable, flexible, and nonlinear, with versatile value, capable of working beyond the confines of cultural bureaucracy.

In this context, the focus shifts from defending the administrative hierarchy to orchestrating events. New formulas for Belarusian identity.

There is an urgent need for a design of post-classical consciousness. Without it, Belarusian politics will successfully do away with Belarusian culture.