Marina Naprushkina: Doppelte Diktatur

Marina Naprushkina, born 1981, grew up in Minsk, Belarus. She is now living in Frankfurt there she attends the Städelschule Art Academy.

A major part of her work, paintings, drawings and films, is on the subject the society of Belarus. Sometimes, the conceptual paintings references to former painting of social realism. In Naprushkina motifs, the ordinary life in Belarus is unfolded, i.e. the pioneer girls and the elderly people who often is left to clean the streets. A major part of her work is based on the rhetorical propagandistic images of the Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko, a president who want to present himself as a strong and good leader of his country. ”The state for the people” as can be read on the presidents own website. As most leaders he want to get identified with specific symbols, i.e. religion, the military, athletes and children. In the motifs Lukashenko poses with the military, light candles in the church or give his tribute to ”the heroes of the people”.

The exhibition title Doppelte Diktatur (Double dictatorship) comes from the idea that both artists and dictators work with specific aesthetical ideals that they want to bring forward in order to support certain ideologies. The image is an instrument often to fulfil other more hidden agendas. Through the paintings and films of Marina Naprushkina, the viewer does not only get a exceptional inside perspective in a post soviet country searching for an identity, but also a suggestion how images can work as a rhetorical instrument for both artists and dictators.

Marina Naprushkina
Doppelte Diktatur