Maria Lasmakova firmly believes that, despite contemporary art often being labeled as elitist, “everybody can understand”. Never questioning her desire to be an artist, she is definitely playing a role in making it accessible. In Belarus, she says, art is usually more related to academic skills. Nonetheless, skills are not everything. For Maria, what art has to say is more important showing than how talented someone is. This started to be crystal clear, during 2020, the year of protests and police violence in her country.
Maria was studying abroad, but the news about Belarus was impossible to ignore. She went home for the elections, but since staying in her country was unsafe, she had to go back to Poland. Violence and war are still everyday topics in a country which “speaks about militarisation in a playful way”.
Maria Lasmakova urges awareness
She started to question how it was possible that politics came before human lives. How could it be normal to have parades with children wearing military uniforms with weapons that look like real ones? Or advertisements which invite people to go to war, to “protect” the country from Ukraine? That is why Maria started shifting from the more academic approach to art to the one that we can see now in continuous evolution. Creating a type of art that she describes as “more smart than beautiful”, since 2020 she has never stopped addressing the political issues of her country.
Interaction is indeed a key point of her artworks, since she aims to reach and encourage people to question. Maria Lasmakova’s first series of this kind included the works No Title, Mama!!, Money and Lullaby, 2020. Mama!! is a grenade which, once activated, sounds like baby crying. The contrast between the brutality of the object and the innocent vulnerability of the sound it produces upon activation is something that has shocked those who interact with it.
images by PILOTENKUECHE or supplied by artist
She has never exhibited anything in Belarus. “People know what’s going on there”, so it’s not as useful as doing it abroad where people live in another bubble. This is also addressed by other Belarusian artists, dealing with several Ar(c)tivism projects, as Sergey Shabohin and Igor Shugaleev, who recently took part in the Electronic Music & Performing Arts Festival Electropark in Italy, curated by Anna Daneri.
The difficulty of simplicity
Maria continues to pursue the goal of making everyone understand – because, she says, everyone can. If one child sees her 2024 furry/plastic weapon, Fun Gun, and asks their parents what it’s about, the process of understanding has begun. Maria Lasmakova wants to be heard, and that’s why interaction and colors are central in her works. In this sense, the Playground, 2021, is an artwork that has a lot to say. This artwork maintains a perfect balance between functionality and non-functionality. It addresses bureaucracy as an obstacle for people escaping unsafe countries, seeking legalisation in European Union countries. It seems to be more about citizenship than humanity. And this is something that Maria, artist and person who feels the urgence about addressing these issues, couldn’t ignore.
“If Belarus was a safe place, I would have stayed there: it was not my decision”.
Here in Leipzig, Maria is working on a sculpture using building materials. It will be about disruption, but the universal shape will still provide some hope. Sarcastic, colorful, easy to understand, her next artwork will simultaneously deal with safety and unsafety.
In the end, everybody can understand.
Daria Passaponti
Fleshy Gesture : Texture
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