Anton Snt
Minsk / Antwerpen
photo: Melanie Stegemann
Biography
Growing up in a family of architects, he spent most of his time surrounded by restorers of old paintings and sacred architecture. In the Soviet Union it was a unique community of people of free craftsmen, not subject to the pressure of ideology and repression. Already in elementary school he faced problems from the administration for his freedom of thought. Graduating from two elementary art schools, he went to Art college. From which he was twice expelled for resisting the academic program. After six years he received a degree in Design. At the age of 22 he left the country and began his studies at the University of Warsaw, Institute History of Arts. At the end of 1999 he was invited to an art residency in Switzerland. After studying at the University, in 2001 he returned to Minsk, where he founded the multimedia art group “an angelico“. In 2020, while in Belarus, he took an active part in the resistance to the totalitarian system and at the same time created a radically different corpus of abstract and media artworks.
Artistic method
The principle of the The Desiring-Machines and Rhizomes, outlined in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book “Capitalism and Schizophrenia“, proved to be the closest to the artist’s method. Constantly forming new combinations of various parts or fragments of already completed “machines“ that do not work as originally conceived and their meaning is not that of the manufacturer. Thus, Anton Snt’s works are constantly re-constructions and compositions of incompatible objects and techniques that come together in new conjunctions and then disintegrate to come together again in completely different arrangements. He belongs to the first generation of artists who started with the advent of computers, inspired by their possibilities.
Project during Ateliers Höherweg residency
“Our alienation has reached the point where all we can do is gaze attentively into technologies like a mirror, trying to discern at least a flash or a faint glimpse of ourselves; something what we don’t know that we know.”
* Mark Manders is one of the most important artists of „Modernity as an Unfinished Project“ in which we live with the Internet and computers. His art is a transition between virtual reality and the reality of the virtual and an important step toward the reality of the Real, which is beyond the symbolic and the imaginary meaning of things.