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“Photographer Andrew Miksys, a seasoned traveler, ventures into the spring of Belarus with the eye of a magician. He knows the local terrain well: the distant officialdom and intimate circles, public and private, open and secret, cynical and welcoming, recorded and discarded, winter and summer, the risky future and the scarcity of hope. In search of the space in between, he builds his itinerary as a conceptual trick, following the ideological formulas in expectation of finding the human landscape. Thus, his photographs are not so much a record of Belarus in bloom – an archive of an official jubilation – but a diorama of the solitude of the celebration. Elegiac in color, this marvelous exposé registers Belarus in disjunction. In his photographs of national holidays, however, Miksys enters not only the fractured nature of Belarus or its inherently split personality, but also the twofold reality of the country.

Modern Belarus can be summarized with a single world: bilocation, that is, the ability to appear in two places at the same time. Bilocation is usually encountered in religious, especially Christian, mysticism, where it usually signals saintly behavior. But it is also a marker of black magic: witches have traditionally been charged with being seen in two places at once as a proof of their satanic power. In brief, bilocation is an extraordinary condition, always demanding a double verification of an appearance. No single witness can reliably testify in a case of bilocation. Miksys, however, was able to capture the dual reality of Belarus by simply focusing on the commonplace in the celebratory”.