Olia Sosnovskaya is an artist-researcher based in Minsk, Belarus. She works with text, performance and visual practices. She has an interest in questions of celebration, pleasure and politics; body, dance, gender and post-colonial studies. Olia is a co-organizer of the annual initiative ‘WORK HARD PLAY HARD,’ a series of tours, lectures, performances, talks, workshops and parties, exploring contemporary notions of work, leisure and technology.
During her residency in Yerevan, Olia studied the local context, researching the local electronic/club scene, related bodily and choreographic practices and their political aspects, including post-colonial and gender issues. This developed into artistic work produced with local participants. While in Yerevan she also planned to establish new connections with local artists with an eye to potential future collaborations. She also gave a public talk on the works of contemporary Belarusian female artists relating to issues of gender, sexuality and corporeality, as well as presenting her ongoing artistic research project on the political side of celebrations.
