Short Bio
He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of KALEKTAR, a platform for the research and archiving of Belarusian contemporary art, and the founder and President of Gray Mandorla (Foundation), an institutional platform dedicated to supporting, preserving, and developing contemporary Belarusian culture in exile. He is also a member of the working group of Open Muzej and the founder of Art Aktivist. Shabohin is also the founder of Gray Mandorla Studio in Poznań – an independent art space and community hub that hosts exhibitions, residencies, and collaborative programs.
Born in Navapolack (Belarus). Lives and works in Poznań and Berlin.
Long Bio
Sergey Shabohin is a queer artist, whose works often refer to anti-patriarchal, feminist, and queer optics, the codes of the LGBTQ+ community, and the theme of sexuality. The categories of corporeality, biopolitics, and the “social body” occupy a central place in his artistic practice. His visual language is particularly sensitive to the injustices and issues of invisible and marginalized communities, as well as to displaced or suppressed histories and memories, which he seeks to identify and bring back into the public context.
Shabohin also works as a curator of numerous exhibition projects – from solo shows of fellow artists to large-scale research exhibitions. He employs interdisciplinary practices: in addition to visual art, he works in the fields of theater, film, and music, collaborating with artists, civic activists, philosophers, and writers. His wide multimedia toolkit includes graphic, pictorial, sculptural, and photographic practices, found objects and images, video, installations, text, and narrative forms.
In 2010, at the peak of civic activism in Belarus, the artist formulated the necessity of shifting from partisan strategies in Belarusian art towards art activism. For this purpose, he launched the Art Aktivist online platform, which for three years raised the most urgent issues and contributed to the politicization of Belarusian art. During this period, the artist completely abandoned graphic and pictorial practices, adopted deliberately “poor” anti-aesthetics and activist strategies, created his own slogans, criticized the art system, and lectured on contemporary art (including illegally, at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts). Through his artistic and activist work, Shabohin became one of the leading representatives of the young generation of Belarusian artists of the early 2010s.
In 2015, he became one of the co-founders of the research platform KALEKTAR, which today functions as the largest digital archive of Belarusian art in the form of an encyclopedia and an online magazine.
Since 2020, the artist has lived and worked in Poznań, where he founded Gray Mandorla Studio – an independent art space that brings together the Belarusian emigrant queer community. The studio functions as a place for exhibitions, residencies, and collective meetings; it also houses the office of the research platform KALEKTAR and serves as a shared workspace for other artists.
Since 2023, Shabohin has been a member of the working group for the creation of Open Muzej – the Museum of Belarusian Contemporary Art in Exile.
By 2025, an active community had formed around Gray Mandorla Studio, leading to the creation of the media project GM Room, which unites a range of initiatives originating from the studio: a film blog and cinephile club, a website and map of Poznań, a series of events, and research-based projects. Today, Gray Mandorla Studio and GM Room function as an important center of solidarity, self-organization, and horizontal culture for the Belarusian and international emigrant community in Poland.
In 2026, Shabohin founded and became President of Gray Mandorla (Foundation), a long-term institutional platform established to support, preserve, and develop contemporary Belarusian culture in exile. The Foundation brings together Gray Mandorla Studio, the research platform KALEKTAR, the artist’s archives and artistic legacy, as well as exhibition, educational, performative, ecological, publishing, and research initiatives. Conceived in response to the destruction of independent cultural infrastructure in Belarus and the displacement of cultural communities abroad, the Foundation aims to create sustainable institutional conditions for the preservation, production, and transmission of Belarusian culture across generations.