This year we organized our very first literary festival dedicated to Belarusian women writers — and we think it turned out to be a really special event. When we started planning it, we had one simple idea: what if a literary festival was designed primarily for readers? Very often literary festivals follow a familiar pattern. You come, you listen to writers reading from their books, maybe you buy a book, and then you leave.

We are glad to invite you to our new exhibition. This time, we turned to vernacular photography — and more specifically, to women within it. The exhibition brings together photographs of women from different collections we work with, creating a space where these images can be seen together, in conversation with one another. We didn’t settle on a single title for this exhibition — and that is intentional. Depending on how you choose to look at it, this exhibition becomes a slightly different thing each time.

While the internet is flooded with images from 2016, the Ivan Lutskevich Belarusian Museum in Vilnius invites visitors to a new exhibition titled “1926: An Exhibition About the Future.” The exhibition features Belarusian books published in 1926, love letters written that year by students of the Vilnius Belarusian Gymnasium, and postcards by Belarusian poets. “1926 may not seem particularly remarkable at first glance,” admit the museum’s curators. “Yes, in Minsk the leading linguists of the time were gathering for a legendary conference, the Soviet authorities were investing in new printing typefaces, and from that year onward Belarusian books published in Vilnius and Minsk would never again follow a single shared visual style.