German student: “I couldn’t even imagine clashes were so cruel”
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13:59, — Politics
A photo exhibition «Elections without Choice. Belarus March – 2006" opened in Free University of Berlin on 16 April.
As Deutsche Welle reports, the exhibition contains only 22 photos. A militia squad, installing crowd control fences; an observer, glaring at electorate near ballot-boxes; a demonstrator, giving flowers to a militia officer, armed with a rubber truncheon...
The pictures are fixed to a wire netting, attached to wooden posts. Every photo is given a comment – passages from Minsk journalist Darya Kostenko’s diary. She spent chilly days of March 2006 in a tent town on October (Kastrychnitskya) Square. She was there with her colleagues, authors of the photos – Andrei Lyankevich, Yulia Darashkevich, Jakub Dospiva.
“We are proud the exhibition was opened in our university. Not only documentary character of photos and comments impress, but also the installation itself is a broad hint at barricades and confrontation,” noted Dr. Georg Witte, chairman of the Institute for East European Studies of Free University of Berlin.
An idea to organise a documentary photo exhibition about elections in Belarus belongs to three Czech students of Charles University in Prague,
The exposition was ready to the anniversary of the evens on October Square. More than 2000 Prague dwellers attended it. The exposition was moved to Brno and then to Poland and Slovakia.
Reviews of first visitors of the exhibition “elections without choice” in Free University of Berlin, were similar: the exposition is impressing and informative. “I’m interested in everything, connected with Belarus. We heard much that presidential elections in Belarus didn’t conform to standards. In my view, it’s a great idea to introduce this information in visual images. I couldn’t even imagine the clashes were so cruel,” one of the visitors of the exhibition says.
As one of the visitors, who knew nothing about Belarus, noted, “the pictures shocked me, and wire netting deepened the impression.”
These opinions mean the organisers of the exhibition have achieved their goal: it has attracted attention of the Berlin dwellers and made them think that the dictator regime mustn’t exist in Europe.
