Meet the Mentees & Mentors of Artscape Mentorship Program 2024: Aliaksandra Tratsiakova (Belarus)

We are starting Meet the Mentees & Mentors of Artscape Mentorship Program 2024 series of introduction.

Aliaksandra Tratsiakova says her art exists in two fields – sculpture and painting. “Those two worlds manifest in different ways. As a painter I exist between two genres, symbolism and surrealism but I would like not to emphasize my connection with a specific genre. I create empty parallel cities which exist for themselves, and so, they are not designed to support life inside them. People who come to these places seem like they don’t belong there and they are all alone. Using symbols I listen to my intuition, not giving a clear answer what exactly each of them mean. I can feel what is behind but if I could describe it with words I would not have a need to paint.

My sculptures are different, they tell about my human emotions in a simple, naive way. They resemble my own life experience, my emigration story with periods of deep loneliness, in a subtle way, without excessive expressiveness and drama but with little calm gestures that give only hints of the complex and dramatic stories of the characters. I prefer working with papier-mâché, creating tiny human characters that would resemble people feeling small and insignificant in their own lives. In my own life, it is connected with emigration, but it is the story of many people in every country, bearing insecurity, loneliness and feeling of their own insignificance”, – goes into details Aliaksandra

Her mentor, Marta Frėjutė, is an artist living and working in Vilnius. In her artistic practice, she explores the interweaving of fiction and memory within shifting historical contexts and its reflection in everyday life and myths. By combining installations, sculptural objects, photography, and historical sources, Marta questions power dynamics, colonial fantasies, and the fetishization of technological and scientific progress. Marta is a PhD candidate at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, where she also teaches.

Artscape Mentorship Program is a cultural-educational program created to nurture creativity and empower artists and creatives with a refugee background to develop their artistic and cultural ideas.

The program powered by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

Program partners: the Vilnius City Municipality, the Kazickas Family Foundation, and the Lithuanian Culture Council.

The activity is part of the “Get the net” project (The Action Civil Society Cooperation in the fields of Youth, Education and Training – FPA (ERASMUS-2023-CSC-OG-FPA).