'Fog is the bison of history'
“Fog is the bison of history” video installation approaches Białowieża forest at the Polish-Belarusian border through the choreography of walking. Walking through the forest, border, museum displays, memorial sites, and walking in a protest march is a political gesture of moving through overlapping temporalities and landscapes marked by state and imperial violence, forced migration, extractivism and ecological crises, tracing what is visible and what gets concealed. Tracing, how deep time of primeval forest and its multiple histories of struggles could resist and escape nationalist discourses of border regimes, fixed national identities and linear historical narratives.
Histories of the borderlands unfold through the figures of bison, partisans and tuteishy — “those from here”— a category of local belonging that refuses fixed national identity, shared across Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania.
Białowieża is further approached through its entanglement into systems of knowledge: institutionalized knowledge of law and official archives, as well as community knowledges that resist institutionalisation, affects of language and opacity of archives. Quoting conversations with scientists and activists, poetry and legal documents, it attempts to break with the imperial grammar through citation, translation and remixing.
The work addresses aftermaths of the suppressed 2020-21 uprising in Belarus through the humanitarian crisis at the Belarus-EU border and Russia’s war on Ukraine. The proximity of the border that can’t be crossed in any direction — neither by people on the move feeling to Europe, facing racialized violence and legal violations despite the ongoing efforts of border activists, nor by the artist herself unable to go to Belarus due to political persecution — highlight fugitivity and exile as a complex political space.
The title quotes a poem by Valzhyna Mort ‘Music for Girl’s Voice and Bison’ (2018).
Writing, directing: Olia Sosnovskaya
Production assistance: Aleksei Borisionok
Camera: Olia Sosnovskaya, Alena Sasnouskaya
Music: Беловежская пуща [Belovezhskaya pushcha] (1975, composer Alexandra Pakhmutova, lyrics Nikolai Dobronravov)
Rework, mixing and recording: Zosia Hołubowska
Voice: Olia Sosnovskaya
Produced at Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen within the framework of the Fellowship Program for Art and Theory. Production supported by Kunstraum MEMPHIS.
Exhibition view: Landscapes of Unrest: Bodies, Memories, Revolt, Bita Bell, Kandis Friesen, Jeanna Kolesova, Olia Sosnovskaya curated by Barbara Mahlknecht, Kunstpavillon 2026. Photo: Daniel Jarosch
