Lesia Pcholka

Lesia Pcholka is a Belarusian artist, archivist and activist. She is the founder of the VEHA platform and teaches at the European College for Liberal Arts in Belarus. Her work explores everyday life, memory, and social issues through art and participatory practice. Lesia works are in the collection of the gallery IoDeposito (Italy) and in private collections in Belarus, Poland, Germany.

Pcholka earned her degree in Social Psychology from the Minsk Innovation University in 2015 and graduated from several international educational programs, including Biz4all by ODB Brussels (2016), ArtPlatform by the European Cultural Foundation (2018), Creative Enterprise by Nesta (2018), Sputnik Photos Mentoring Programme (2020), The East-European School of Political Studies (2020) and others.

In 2013, Lesia founded the first charity shop in Belarus (KaliLaska) which she  led until 2016. In  2017, Pcholka founded VEHA (http://veha.by/),  an independent cultural initiative dedicated to archival photos and everyday life of Belarus. Through this platform, she has published two books of archival photos and research texts by different authors: The Best side (Najlepšy bok) in 2018 and Hen-party and Last Photo (Dziavočy viečar and Apošni fotazdyma) in 2021. She has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions in Belarus and Czech Republic and in group exhibitions all over Europe.

In 2021, she was welcomed as an ICORN artist in residence in the Polish city of Gdansk. Since she has arrived she is working on a personal exhibition and a book on projects in Belarus.

You can learn more about Lesia Pcholka’s work on her website or by following her on Instagram.