The Face of the Revolution is Female
HMKV im Dortmunder U | Ebene 3
Image: Zhiyuan Yang, Make a Little Sun, Videostill, 2024, © Zhiyuan Yang
The book The Face of the Revolution is Female (Die Revolution hat ein weibliches Gesicht, Suhrkamp 2021) by Belarusian philosopher Olga Shparaga reports on the 2020 revolution in Belarus and the central role of women in this process. What has been happening in Belarus since the presidential elections on August 9, 2020, goes far beyond a regional protest movement against rigged elections. Hundreds of thousands of courageous citizens from all walks of life are countering the brutality of the regime with nonviolence, creative diversity, and decentralized self-organization. History is being made in Minsk and many other cities in this largely unknown country between Russia and the EU. Female, peaceful, post-national—this is how the author characterizes the upheaval in her country and places the events in the context of European and global emancipation movements.
In conversation with Inke Arns, co-curator of Comrade Sun and director of the HMKV. Admission is free.
Olga Shparaga, born in 1974, studied philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum and Belarusian State University in Minsk. Between 2001 and 2014, she taught at the European Humanities University in Minsk (since 2005 in exile in Vilnius). In 2014, she and her colleagues founded the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus (ECLAB) in Minsk. In 2020, she was arrested twice and subsequently went into exile. In the winter semester of 2025, she was a Käthe Leichter visiting professor at the University of Vienna, and she is currently conducting research as a visiting scholar at the FernUniversität Hagen. Shparaga is a member of the feminist group founded during the protests in Belarus as part of the Coordination Council, the political organ of the opposition against dictator Alexander Lukashenko. In 2024, she was awarded the Voltaire Prize by the University of Potsdam.
©Fernuniversität Hagen
The event is part of the Kleiner Freitag series of events organised by the Dortmunder U.
