Olia Sosnovskaya
"Fog is the bison of history"
Fog is the bison of history focuses on Białowieża forest as a site of sedimented histories of struggle, oppression, interimperiality and a contested borderland.
Historically part of several empires and states and a witness to their dissolution and partisan uprisings, one of the largest remaining parts of the primeval forest in Europe and home to a near threatened european bison, a site of today’s EU border and, since 2021, of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, Białowieża is a space of struggles over collective memory and nation-building, extractivism and conservation policies, border regimes, knowledge production and (non)linearity of political time.
The project title quotes a poem by Valzhyna Mort Music for Girl’s Voice and Bison (2018).
Text: Olia Sosnovskaya
Olia Sosnovskaya is an artist, writer and cultural organiser born in Minsk, Belarus, based in Vienna, Austria. Her artistic and research practice intertwines performance, visual arts, text- and workshop-based activities, addressing forms of political organizing, protest choreographies, movement scores and intersections of festivity and the political. Member of WHPH / Decentric Circles self-organised platform https://workhardplay.pw/ and the artistic-research group Problem Collective, focused on strikes, archives, reading practices and tools for engagement with overseen histories and social struggles https://problemcollective.org/. Currently a Phd-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Her individual and collective works were presented in Kunsthalle Wien, e-flux, Tanzquartier Wien, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Kyiv Biennial, Biennale Matter of Art (Prague), HKW (Berlin), HAU (Berlin), Manifesta Biennial (Kosovo), documenta fifteen, among others.