Culture and Art Holding website archive blocked for users

The web­site of the state edi­to­r­i­al and pub­lish­ing orga­ni­za­tion Cul­ture and Art has been unavail­able in the last few days. The kimpress.by vis­i­tors are greet­ed with the fol­low­ing mes­sage: “Account blocked by the serv­er admin­is­tra­tor.”

A pho­to from the Kul­tura news­pa­per pub­lished on the blocked kimpress.by web­site

Since 2002, the Cul­ture and Art hold­ing has com­bined two the­mat­ic pub­li­ca­tions. These are the week­ly Kul­tura news­pa­per which has been pub­lished since Octo­ber 1991 and the month­ly Mas­tat­st­va mag­a­zine estab­lished in Jan­u­ary 1983.

The site con­tained all the archives of the Kul­tura and Mas­tat­st­va pub­li­ca­tions from the 2000s. The site stopped being updat­ed in 2021, when the edi­to­r­i­al and pub­lish­ing insti­tu­tion decid­ed to move to a new plat­form, but it remained acces­si­ble to vis­i­tors.

A pho­to from the Kul­tura news­pa­per pub­lished on the blocked kimpress.by web­site

The site con­tained the entire his­to­ry of Belaru­sian art from the begin­ning of the 21st cen­tu­ry. In addi­tion to artists loy­al to the regime, it also fea­tured works that chal­lenged the sta­tus quo. This is accord­ing to one of the employ­ees of the hold­ing, who worked there until 2020. Many of the artists fea­tured in the edi­tions are cur­rent­ly fac­ing legal chal­lenges or are in exile. Their work no longer aligns with the cur­rent sys­tem.

“We also cov­ered the phil­an­thropic endeav­ors of Vik­tar Babary­ka, the Anzha­li­ka Krasheuskaya fes­ti­val, inde­pen­dent the­aters, and the for­mer Yan­ka Kupala the­ater group, who have recent­ly faced chal­lenges. Addi­tion­al­ly, approx­i­mate­ly half of the jour­nal­ists from Kul­tura and Mas­tat­st­va have tran­si­tioned to inde­pen­dent media,” the inter­locu­tor stat­ed.

Some kimpress.by mate­ri­als are acces­si­ble through web.archive.org.

Since the sum­mer of 2022, the holding’s new web­site (kultura-info.by) has only pub­lished ide­o­log­i­cal­ly con­sis­tent con­tent on Belaru­sian cul­ture.