Olga Bubich: ICORN resident in Berlin City of Refuge

Olga Bubich is a writer, journalist, photographer, lecturer, and art critic from Belarus. Since starting her career in the 2000s, she has been focused on cultural, social, and political themes. Bubich has received awards including ‘Publication of the year’ (Month of Photography in Minsk, 2017), ‘Kultura Vazhyz’ (‘Culture Matters’, 2016), ‘On the Way to Contemporary Museum’ (2015), and the prize for Erik Stepanjan’s ‘Lucas’ photobook review (St. Petersburg, 2014).

Prior to the 2020-2021 protests in Belarus, which saw dozens of journalists arrested, Bubich primarily wrote about art, culture, and photography in her home country and abroad. For 13 years, between 2003 and 2016, Bubich also worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Speech Communication at the Belarusian State University, authoring several textbooks as part of her job.

In 2021, Olga Bubich published her second photobook ‘The Art of (not) Forgetting’ and grew more interested in the topics of memory, memory censorship, cultural amnesia, post-memory, and memorialisation. As part of this, she created a short series of lectures and practical tasks on these themes, and she has, so far, taught them online to over 30 artists and photographers based in and out of Belarus due to forced migration. In 2021-2023, she co-organised four exhibitions in Berlin, Tbilisi, and Batumi, bringing together artists whose work challenges the conventional understanding of collective and personal memory and addresses the issues of propaganda resistance.

Arriving in her ICORN residency in 2022, Bubich has since continued her work. She has focused on the issues of memory/forgetting from different perspectives, and counter-memory activism through art through exploring the memorialisation cultures of Germany, Austria, Belarus, Poland, Argentina, Russia, and Hong Kong.

You can find out more about Olga Bubich on her ICORN resident profile. To keep up-to-date with Olga Bubich’s work, follow her on Instagram and visit her website.

Berlin ICORN City of Refuge

Berlin joined ICORN at the 2018 ICORN General Assembly in Malmö, hosting writers, artists, and journalists through the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD programme. Berlin is one of three ICORN Cities of Refuge in Germany, alongside Hannover and Frankfurt. Since 2018, Berlin has hosted seven ICORN residents, including Nada Al Khawwam. Alongside Olga Bubich, Berlin is currently hosting three other ICORN residents who remain anonymous.

‍Some of Olga Bubich’s work:

‘Memory Ownership’: One, No One, and 9.4 Million’. 360° Virtual Exhibition in Tbilisi, Georgia.

‘Overcoming Public Amnesia – Counter-Memory as a Tool to Challenge Official Narratives’, Versopolis.

‘From here to home: Belarussian political refugees in Batumi’, Chaikhana (in Georgian and English).

‘Flucht aus Belarus’, Die Presse (in German).

‘Memory Wars in Belarus 1937-2020’, Baltic Worlds (in English).

‘Learning to Hear Memories that Talk in Whispers’ (in English).