ABSTRACT
Since the early 2000s, the artist Antonina Slobodchikova has probed the contemporary Belarusian political and social context by deconstructing existing narratives of historical memory and national identity formation. This chapter examines the role of cyclical temporality in Slobodchikova’s work—a temporality that refuses the possibility of the future and instead imagines the present as always defined in terms of the past. This analysis locates Slobodchikova’s artistic praxis in relation to recent conceptualizations of the “nonidentity problem,” a paradox introduced by Derek Parfit in the 1980s as part of his work in population ethics. According to Parfit, the “nonidentity problem” is when an individual appears to be wronged by an action that is the condition of his or her own existence. As an investigation into the relationship between identity and existence, the theory of the “nonidentity problem” offers a fruitful framework for Slobodchikova’s critique of the Belarusian political present, one that is shaped by the ideologically driven narratives of the historical past as a site of national trauma.
