Maria Gvardeitseva
(b. 1982, BY)
Maria Gvardeitseva, born in 1982 in Minsk, Belarus, residing and working in London, the United Kingdom, brings the political into the personal and the personal into the political with a kind of unapologetic intimacy that sticks with you. Working across video, sculpture, performance, and installation, Gvardeitseva uses her own life—her exile, her body, her memories—as both source and surface. She fled Belarus under the weight of a regime she could no longer abide by and, in the process, found not just a new home in London but a new kind of authorship. Her art is confrontation and confession, laced with irony and textured by ritual.
In Migrant’s Altar (2022–ongoing), Gvardeitseva turns disassembled suitcases into relics of departure. They form an altar of sorts, filled with fragments of a life left behind—photographs, keepsakes, traces of home. The work refuses to cast exile as shame or punishment, reframing it as a conscious act of self-preservation. In 2022, she made that intention formal, renouncing her Belarusian citizenship. She turned that moment into a sculpture, too: titled Anatomy of Citizenship, where her passport stands apart from her personal mementos, a document suspended in its own sterile frame. The symbolism is precise and unflinching.
Her feminist sensibility cuts through in 5-Minute Bedtime Stories (2023), a project that recasts divorce not as a failure but as a kind of initiation. Channeling the structure of fairy tales and borrowing from Vladimir Propp’s taxonomy of narrative, Gvardeitseva flips the idea of “happily ever after” on its head. The work was shown at Fitzrovia Gallery in London and is now becoming a book published by Skira Arte. It rewrites stories, pulling grief into clarity and women out of blame.
In The Adoration of the Mystic Goat (2024), Gvardeitseva leans into mythology to sketch out her own iconography. Exhibited at the Museum of Free Belarus in Warsaw, the installation riffs on van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece but swaps the lamb for a goat, the sacred for the unruly. Using 100-year-old windows, vintage mirrors, and pieces from her family archive, she builds a space of reflection—literally and figuratively. It’s a kind of fractured shrine, a place for mirror-thinking, where viewers might glimpse not just her internal monsters but their own. Maria Gvardeitseva builds worlds of rupture and repair where irony walks hand in hand with reverence. Her practice, like her life, refuses the easy story. And that refusal is precisely what gives her work its weight.
Her upcoming project, Bitter Herbs, takes her back to the forests and fields of Eastern Europe to engage with Holocaust memory in Belarus and the Baltics. In a landscape where official stories often smooth over historical truths, Gvardeitseva uses the terrain itself—grasses, branches, soil—to evoke the tactile nature of remembrance.
Throughout it all, Gvardeitseva works at the intersection of the social and the symbolic. She is attuned to the “Big 8” markers of identity—age, gender, race, ability, class, nationality, religion, and sexuality—but never lets those categories settle into static roles. Instead, she pulls them through crochet thread, through latex skin casts, through the fragile glass of salvaged windows. The work is lived-in, layered, and often tender.
Maria Gvardeitseva was born in 1982 in Minsk, Belarus, where she obtained an MA in Communications. She then moved to London, studied Art History at Sotheby’s, and achieved her MA in Arts and Politics at Goldsmiths University of London. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Museum of Free Belarus in Warsaw, Poland; the Mark Rothko Art Center in Daugavpils, Latvia; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus.
For more information, please consult the artist’s website here.
Last Updated on April 15, 2025
About the author:
Sylvia Walker (b. 1986, US) is an art historian, essayist, art critic, and curator. After contributing to numerous publications, and curating exhibitions in the United States of America and beyond, she currently works as the assistant director of Contemporary Art Issue (CAI).
