Called to the Carpet

Called to the Carpet examines the mechanisms of biopolitical control directed against women political prisoners in Belarus. The title refers to the expression “to be called to the carpet” — to be summoned by an authority for reprimand or punishment.

In the first part of the project, I work with prison mugshots of women sentenced after the falsified 2020 presidential elections and weave them by myself into carpets. The portraits are deliberately blurred and abstracted, reflecting the regime’s attempt to erase individuality and reduce prisoners to faceless elements of a repressive system. This visual disappearance extends political violence — in prison, women are subjected to sexualised, psychological, and physical abuse. The mugshots are sourced from the archive of the human rights organisation Viasna. The carpets are woven in a black-and-grey palette, echoing the quality of the source material: mugshots printed on cheap, fading paper. Each carpet measures 100 × 70 cm and is framed with textile margins on the sides.

The choice of carpet as a medium is deliberate. Historically, weaving was a traditional form of women’s labour in Belarus. Today, in Belarusian prisons, female political prisoners are forced to work in factories, sewing uniforms for the Belarusian and Russian armies without any experience. I learned to weave from scratch, and the first carpets bear visible imperfections, I deliberately kept them as an act of solidarity with imprisoned women. Also in Soviet and post-Soviet interiors, wall carpets symbolised comfort and protection. Women played a crucial role in the 2020 Belarusian protests. Despite threats, arrests, and persecution, they marched, formed solidarity chains, and supported one another. Many of those who now remain in prison were among the most visible faces of these protests, embodying courage and collective resistance. According to the human rights organisation Viasna, since August 2020 more than 8,000 women in Belarus have been subjected to repression.

The second part of the project focuses on the conditions in which women political prisoners in Belarus live, as well as on their ingenuity and resilience. Deprived of basic self-care items, they invent ways to preserve dignity and selfhood: creating makeup brushes from their own hair, matches, and threads; ironing clothes with aluminum mugs heated by immersion boilers; using cigarette capsules as perfume; and moisturising their skin with masks made from prison bread, etc. I recreated and documented these fragile objects as still lifes, drawing on letters and testimonies of former prisoners. I show not only the phenomenon of political repression through the woven carpets, but also the acts of resistance and endurance through the photographs, revealing how even under systematic violence women preserve their dignity and individuality.

This project is deeply personal. In 2020, I was sentenced and forced to flee Belarus in 2021; had I stayed, I could have become one of these women.
Today, more than 180 women are officially recognised as political prisoners in Belarus, around 30% of them mothers of underage children.

The work has been realised in collaboration with Politvyazynka and Pink Scarves, initiatives supporting Belarusian women political prisoners.