Interview

Maxim Tyminko in Conversation with Tatiana Kochubinska

Title reference¹

A Percussion Piece for Two Thousand and Nine Players, video work.

Maxim Tyminko: Yes, loud works… But I’m not a loud speaker. I’m a soft speaker. (laughs) Okay.

All right, all right, all right, all right.

This work is loud because of its subject. Most of my work is not loud, but this one has to be.

You cannot remain silent when you see what is happening, when you see how many people are suffering—especially since 2020, when tortures continued on such a massive scale in Belarus, and then the war in Ukraine and all the catastrophes that followed. I realized that it is not possible just to stay silent. And if you are not silent, then you have to be loud. Otherwise, what is the point? Why say something soft and politically correct when the reality demands a much stronger voice?

The number of prisoners is so enormous that our voice has to be just as loud.

M. T.: Yeah, but I don’t think it was a complete break. I was mostly focusing on different activities, and today I realize that all of this is actually part of my entire artistic practice.

I started this activism in 2011, when there was another big protest in Belarus. The authorities violently crushed the rally, many people were beaten, and although the repression was not on the same scale as after 2020, but still it was a huge shock.

At that moment, I already realized that it was becoming very difficult to continue working as a media artist dealing with new technologies, developing systems and all this kind of stuff, while somehow ignoring what was happening around me. At the same time I also felt that I didn’t have the artistic language to address this. I had never worked with this topic before, and I felt I had to do something, but I didn’t know how to express it through my own practice.

That’s when I started the platform antibrainwash.net². I invited Belarusian artists and designers to upload their posters, leaflets, and protest materials, and made them freely available for download and printing. The idea was very simple: you upload your design, and people can immediately download it in formats like A3 or A4 and print it at home. It became a platform for spreading visual materials, and for a while it was really active. Many artists contributed, and I saw that people were actually using and distributing these works.

But gradually the protest movement declined, artists became less active, and the platform disappeared. But back then, I saw it as a parallel activity. I never really connected it to my artistic practice. After 2020, it became clear to me that this was not a parallel reality—this was actually my practice. This was what I was really doing. And that was the biggest change for me after 2020. I stopped pretending to be a conventional artist in terms of producing objects or making something that could simply be presented as an artwork. That was never really my approach anyway. I was always working with things that were time-based, event-based, connected to sound, or something more ephemeral and difficult to define.

But then I realized that organizing, structuring, working with other artists, and collaborating with different organizations—this is actually what makes my art also.

M. T.: I would start from the last part of your question, about algorithms and social choreography, because this is actually what interests me the most. I have always been interested in something that is not completely controlled by the artist, by me. It is really about creating a set of rules, and then the system starts to grow, to evolve, and to have its own life. Even before my programming skills and programming-based artworks, when I was mostly doing video art, this idea was already important for me. For example, I was using loops all the time. I wanted there to be no clear beginning or end of the work, but rather something that keeps evolving. I was experimenting with very simple things: using only four or five images or frames in a video, looping them for half an hour or more, adding music or mostly sound. And then you start to realize that these few frames are somehow developing. Your brain makes them change.

This relationship between very simple programming rules and our own life experience is really important for me. It is also important for me to experience this as an artist—to not know exactly what the work will become before I see it already existing in the world, in public. But yes, technology is also simply part of my interest in life because it is part of our life. We cannot separate ourselves from technology anymore. We have grown into technology, or technology has grown into our lives. So for me, it would be strange not to think about it.

And as you mentioned, technology is also very connected to protests, governments, and power. The protests in Belarus in 2020 were actually possible because of technology. There was a civic platform called Golos³, together with initiatives like ZUBR and Honest People, that created a kind of parallel system for verifying the election results. People could see the real results of the elections through this network and this application. Before that, everybody knew that elections were probably fake, but there was no evidence. People still thought: maybe Lukashenko really has many supporters. But this technology, which was open source and created through a kind of collective effort, showed people the real numbers. It helped them understand that they were not a minority. And it also helped people outside Belarus understand that this was not just an imagination of a small group of people, but something real.

Of course, technology also helped with organizing the protests—the Telegram channels, the communication networks, sharing information about where police were moving, and so on. But on the other side, repression is also based on technology now. The same tools are used for control. People have been arrested because of their participation in Telegram channels, such as for example, Belarusian Hajun project among others⁴. The state can track these networks and use them against people.

So, of course, technology can be used in very destructive ways. But at the same time, it is just a tool. Technology itself is not good or bad—it depends on how it is used. Even this Percussion Piece is possible only because of technology, because we have this network, we can make the call, we can reach people.

M. T.: It started when I was still a student at Minsk Glebov’s Art College. Artist Alexander Komarov and I made a band, together with Sergei Pukst and Dmitry Los. At that time, there was still a separation between artistic life and musician life—two different worlds. But we were trying to bring them together, because we couldn’t really just play music, so we created shows with film projections, performances. It was already part of the artistic practice, although I didn’t realize at that moment that it was connected to my main work.

Later, when I started thinking more about media, technology, and time-based art, I understood this connection more clearly. For me, working with media or video has something very close to the musician’s path. It has the same kind of integrity: it is not only about the tools or technology used to produce the work, but about structure and time. You need time to experience media work; you cannot grasp it in one glance like a sculpture or painting.

But at the same time I never used music as a background for my visual works. Either the sound itself is the main element, or there is silence. But I was always thinking through musical structures. I experimented with transforming musical notation into visuals—imagining the notes as visual sequences rather than audio sequences—and thinking about the relationship between musical and visual structures.

Sound and music for me are something very natural, something that comes from inside. Most of the time, it doesn’t need to be conceptualized or explained intellectually. It is a very powerful tool because you can reach people without a language…

M. T.: Let me start from the drumming. This is what I do. I can’t play any other instruments, but I can drum. I’m not a trained drummer; I’m self-trained. Once, I was talking to a very nice musician, a multi-instrumentalist who played almost any instrument you can imagine. And he said to me: “Oh, drumming is actually such a simple and beautiful instrument. You just listen to your heartbeat and follow it. Your blood is pumping, and you don’t really do anything—your body just starts moving in rhythm.”

And actually, I was experimenting with that a lot. You let your body do whatever it wants, and then you create rhythms. And this is what is really so powerful. Rhythm and beats are something very deep, something connected, probably, to the heartbeat, maybe even deeper, to some cellular rhythms, or the rhythm of the universe. We live in constant cycles, constant rhythms. Everything is in rhythmic procession. For us, it is probably the easiest and deepest way to engage with something. If you start hearing rhythms, you cannot help it, you start moving. It takes you into something very deep, into the emotional bolts and nuts of your body and soul.

Therefore, drumming for me is very interesting, very important, and a very powerful tool.

M. T.: In terms of Maidan, I think it carried the spirit of warriors, and it really worked. I was listening to those drums in real time. Maidan was also probably the first major protest that people could follow online, continuously and in real time. But the Percussion Piece is not only about protest. It is not just about making something loud so that everyone hears it—it is also about making something audible for yourself. It is a way of expressing something that cannot be put into words, something emotional.

That is why the slogan Make Noise is so powerful. You are not making music. You are making noise—loud noise, maybe soft noise as well. But it is noise as a form of self-expression. This expression is not simply a direct act of protest: it is not about immediately producing signatures, petitions, or a concrete outcome.

It is about experience. And this is what makes it a work of art: people enter an emotional connection with real people who are imprisoned right now, and they express this connection through rhythm, sound, and noise. When you place a cardboard box over your head, you still have small openings through which you can see the world around you, but you remain inside the box. You are working with yourself while being part of a large crowd. I think this tension—between isolation and collective experience—is a very important part of the piece.

Usage of self-made instruments, tins, and percussions makes also one of the easiest ways to participate. People can do it without any knowledge, without any training, without any additional exercises. Everybody can make noise, create rhythms, create sounds. And if you listen to your neighbor, you might start repeating, responding, playing together, and so on. My hope is that this Percussion Piece will work in this way. It is also part of my idea: you just follow the rules, the basic rules. You stay there, you listen to your neighbor, and you produce a sound.

Then a huge number of people will create a structure that is alive, unpredictable for everyone, but very unique and surprising. Maybe it will be powerful, maybe it will be less powerful, but nevertheless, it will be very important for each participant, because they produce the sounds and create them together. And every time we repeat it somewhere else, it will become a completely different piece, with a completely different atmosphere and energy. This is also very interesting and important: we create only one moment. We create it only now, and it exists only now. Your experience is real and belongs to that particular moment.

M. T.: I started working with political prisoners, although I have always felt a little uneasy with this term. Many of these people are not political activists in the traditional sense—they are simply people who expressed themselves, spoke out, or tried to live freely, and were oppressed by a regime. Calling them “political prisoners” can make them appear like political figures, whereas what I see are individuals who simply want to live normal lives in a free country.

Of course, their cases are political, and we cannot deny that. But before anything else, they are people.

M. T.: I started working with political prisoners—or, more precisely, with databases of people who were persecuted⁵. At the beginning, I was confronted with these huge numbers that we constantly hear in the media: thousands arrested, thousands recognized as political prisoners. For a country of around nine million people, these numbers are enormous.

But numbers alone are abstract. They do not create a personal connection. They become statistics, something difficult to emotionally grasp. That is why I felt it was important to focus on individual people. The database I worked with documented each person—their name, age, situation, and often included a photograph. When I saw these portraits, I realized I wanted to bring these people back into view as individuals.

I put all available portraits in a video sequence and realized that if each person appeared on screen for only two seconds, showing all the portraits would take more than two hours. That was the moment when I physically understood the scale of the repression. Later, while working with Music for Belarus on benefit concerts supporting prisoners, I created video projections using these portraits. Preparing the images was a simple technical process: I adjusted every photograph so that all the eyes were aligned. But this meant that I had to look directly into the eyes of every person. At that time, there were 2009 portraits.

And after going through them all, I felt depressed. Because behind every image there was a real person: young people, older people, workers, designers—people with ordinary lives, families, memories. They were not abstract victims. They were individuals. For me, the most important realization was simple: behind every number there is a human being. I wanted to share that experience with others. During the performances, we used a counter that continued counting the portraits: one, two, three, four… It never stopped. You begin to understand that the number is not just a statistic—it represents thousands of individual lives.

Then I started thinking: what if we could see all these people together, in one place? What happens when we experience this scale visually while still remembering each person individually?

I created a video sketch where I multiplied myself 2000 times. But even then, I could not fit everyone into one frame—I needed a panorama. If you reduce thousands of faces to fit a normal screen, they disappear and become only pixels. This showed me the tension between scale and individuality: a huge number is made of thousands of personal stories. This is also why the participation of performers is important. Each person comes, wears one mask, and represents one individual. Instead of facing an anonymous mass, they encounter one person. It creates a personal connection rather than a distant observation of statistics.

The idea of masks and boxes comes from our activist experience in 2011, when we protested near the Belarusian embassy in The Hague. We created simple boxes with images of presidential candidates who had been beaten and imprisoned. It started as a very simple gesture because we did not know what else we could do. But when I put the box on my head, I realized something important: from the outside, you represent another person. You give a symbolic presence to someone who cannot be there.

This idea continues in the project. When participants wear these boxes with portraits, they give presence to people who are absent. They also experience a symbolic form of confinement: they are inside the box, seeing the world through small openings.

For me, this one-to-one connection between the performer and the person represented is the most important part of the work.

M. T.: The ethical question is definitely important. We use only images that are already publicly available in human rights databases. I cannot guarantee what legal processes they went through, but from what I know, if a person or their relatives do not want to be included, they are removed from the database. So we work with images that have already passed through some kind of ethical filter.

There was a similar discussion when we exhibited in Kyiv⁶, about whether we should blur faces. We decided not to, because if an image is already publicly available, we are not exposing the person more than they are already exposed. And for this work, seeing the faces is very important—it creates a personal connection. When people are shown only through masks or anonymous figures, you lose the feeling that these are real individuals.

Of course, I understand the need for protection. But these databases are already very public and are used by human rights organizations, media, and even authorities. So in a way, the exposure has already happened before our work. The question is also about visibility: these databases have their own criteria for who is included, and many people who are persecuted are not there. Some people remain invisible not because they don’t want to be represented, but because they are outside these systems.

M. T.: All the time!

M. T.: I still don't have any final decision for myself or solution to this question.

M. T.: No, no. Of course, I would like to invite people to the art piece. But how they perceive it is up to them. I can't say, no, no, no, you can't perceive it as a political demonstration. I would just like people who come to realize that it's not a political demonstration. It's an art piece because it gives a different attitude, a different perspective.

If you perceive it as a political demonstration, then you start to expect slogans, banners, flags. And this is not part of it. Here there are very clear means of communication: the masks, the percussion sounds, and the tribune. These are the three elements. Whether this achieves political goals, emotional engagement, aesthetic fascination, or whether it's simply spectacular for somebody—that's another aspect. We don't do normal political demonstration activities, like signing letters to political prisoners or making donations. Those things are important, very good to do, but they're outside the scope of this piece.

For many people who don't know anything about Belarus, political prisoners, or repression, this can simply be an expression of solidarity with people who suffer. They don't even need to know the political reasons. It can be about compassion. So this is my point. It's more about emotion, solidarity, compassion, and thinking about real people who are suffering right now. Whether we achieve political goals, I don't know. What's important is to make it loud enough that people stop and think—not only about Belarus or the people in the portraits, but about repression more generally, about the fragility of freedom. This could happen anytime, to anybody.

For me, that's more important than saying it's political because maybe some prisoners will be released or some politicians in the Hague or Brussels will finally hear us. That work is already being done. What is important here is to raise awareness among Amsterdamers, among people who don't have direct influence, but who can help create an atmosphere where something can move. That's more important for this piece. And we hope people will form it together, and will create it together.

M. T.: First of all, this moment of the 20–30 minutes of the performance itself is extremely important. This life experience, this atmosphere that will be created, is something very valuable. And actually, the short time of existence of the work is also part of its value. Because so much will be done to prepare this moment, to build everything together, and then suddenly there is this flash, this immediate explosion of sound and visual presence of all these people. This moment is very special.

But of course, it is so valuable that we need to record it. We need to somehow include it in the artwork. From the very beginning, I imagined two main goals of the project: the performance itself and the afterlife of the performance as a video and sound installation. The sound will be extremely important because it will be unique in terms of scale, variety, and depth. So we will make a multi-channel recording of the sound, and we will also film the performance for the video installation.

It will definitely be a multi-channel, multi-screen installation because, as I mentioned, you cannot put this amount of people into one standard video frame. They just become pixels. You lose their faces, you lose the possibility to recognize them. But I think the afterlife is not only this formal video and audio artwork. The videos, selfies, photographs, recordings made by people themselves will also be very important. We will try to collect these personal experiences from the participants and, with their permission, use them as part of the afterlife of the work.

Because it will be very interesting to see it from their perspective: what they see, what they hear, how they experience it. So, let’s see.

M. T.: Oh yes! Please register on makenoise.art! It takes less than a minute. Just click the button and enter your email. It's very easy and please come!

About the participants

Maxim Tyminko is a media artist, curator, and developer based in Amsterdam. For more than three decades, he has been among the key figures shaping the field of Belarusian media art while actively contributing to international discourses on digital culture, networked media, and artistic experimentation. His practice explores media infrastructures, software, networked communication, and the politics of digital culture. His work has been presented internationally at transmediale (a festival and year-round project in Berlin), WRO Media Art Biennale, documenta fifteen, Manifesta 14, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Mystetskyi Arsenal, and numerous museums and media art festivals across Europe and beyond.

Tyminko is a co-founder of the antiwarcoalition.art Foundation, where he contributes to the development of artistic and curatorial responses to war, technology, and contemporary political realities. He is also the founder of the self-publishing platform antiwarcoalition.art, co-founder and editor of Cultprotest.me, and co-developer of Kalektar.org, one of the leading research and archival platforms dedicated to Belarusian contemporary art. Alongside his artistic practice, he has co-curated major international exhibitions, including Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance (Kyiv, 2021) and Sense of Safety (Kharkiv, 2024).

Tatiana Kochubinska is an independent curator, art historian, writer, and lecturer focusing on contemporary art, memory, and the legacies of the 1990s in post-Soviet society. She has co-curated major international projects, including Kaleidoscope of (Hi)stories: Ukrainian Art 1912–2023 (Dresden, 2023), Landscapes of an Ongoing Past (Essen, 2024), Sense of Safety (Kharkiv, 2024), and Pairs Skating: Boris Mikhailov and Wolfgang Tillmans (Kharkiv, 2025).

She is editor-in-chief of Sense of Safety: Art in a Time of War (DISTANZ, 2026). She has also co-edited and compiled publications including Kaleidoscope of (Hi)stories. Art from Ukraine (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2023), Fedir Tetianych. Frypulia (Kyiv: PinchukArtCentre, 2022), Parcommune. Place. Community. Phenomenon (Kyiv: PinchukArtCentre, 2019), and Euphoria and Fatigue: Ukrainian Art and Society after 2014 (Obieg journal, 2020). Since 2022, she has been part of the curatorial team at antiwarcoalition.art.