Читать книгу Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art - Группа авторов - Страница 18

Oļegs Tillbergs. Insect, 1995. Image courtesy of the artist and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Kaspars Goba. From the series Seda. People of the Marsh, 2004. Image courtesy of the artist and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Ieva Epnere. Potom, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist.

Inga Erdmane, Rerooted Snapshot, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.

1 The exhibition Faster than History: Contemporary Perspectives on the Future of Art in the Baltic Countries, Finland and Russia was curated by Baltic and Finnish art scholars Sirje Helme, Lolita Jablonskiene, Solvita Krese, Tuula Karjalainen, Marketta Seppälä, and Jari-Pekka Vanhala and held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki in 2004.

2 Initiated and curated by Solvita Krese, since 2014 this annual contemporary art festival has been co-curated by various international curators: Aneta Szyłak, Inga Lāce, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Sumesh Sharma, Àngels Miralda, Katia Krupennikova, Övül Ö. Durmușoğlu, and Joanna Warsza. A significant aspect of the festival is that it uses empty buildings in Riga as venues, bringing attention to their potential for future development. For more about the festival see https://lcca.lv/en/survival-kit/#survivalkit.

3 Monument, curated by Helēna Demakova and including artists from Latvia and the countries that as colonizing powers had an impact on the history of the Latvian state (Russia, Germany, and Sweden), was the third annual exhibition of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art–Riga and took place in the city space of Riga in 1995. Throughout the 1990s, the annual exhibitions of the Soros Art Centers (their network in Eastern Europe was part of a support program initiated by Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros for the former Eastern Bloc countries) were the most visible art events mapping changes in the local art scenes.

4 This work was first shown at an exhibition of contemporary art of the Baltic and Nordic countries, titled Funny versus Bizarre, curated by Kęstutis Kuizinas at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius in 1997. Later it has been widely exhibited internationally.

5 The work by Anna-Stina Treumund was first shown at the international exhibition Lost in Transition, curated by Rael Artel at the Estonian Contemporary Art Museum, Tallinn in 2011. The show was a part of the project Your Periphery Is My Centre, a series of contemporary art events and exhibitions that examine ambivalent aspects of life in the Eastern Europe and its neighboring regions.

6 The work was first shown at the 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art, titled Centre of Attraction and held at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius in 2002. Curated by Tobias Berger and including over sixty international artists, the exhibition was ambitiously positioned as the largest contemporary art event then taking place in North-Eastern Europe.

7 This series of photographs and the almost hour-long film, produced in collaboration with the VFS FILMS | Film Production Company and Filmtank Hamburg, was shown in a number of exhibitions in the West that were mapping the “new” Europe and promoting the concept of a European identity on the occasion of the European Union’s Eastern enlargement. In 2004, these included: Instant Europe at Villa Manin, Passariano, Italy; EU Positive at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany; Breakthrough at Grote Kerk, The Hague, the Netherlands; and in 2005, EuroPart. 25 Pieces. Aktuelle Kunst aus Europa in the public space of Vienna and Salzburg, Austria.

8 According to the latest statistics, about 30 percent of Latvia’s population are members of the Russian-speaking community (comprising not only Russians but also other ethnic minorities from the former Soviet republics, including Ukrainians, Belarusians, etc.). In Estonia, this group represents 27 percent of the population; in Lithuania, 7 percent. Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, this was 49 percent in Latvia, 35 percent in Estonia, and 10 percent in Lithuania.

9 Kristina Norman’s project After-War, curated by Marco Laimre, represented Estonia at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. After-War was based on several of Norman’s previous projects addressing the Bronze Soldier, such as the film Monolith (2007) and the installation Community (2007). The latter consists of souvenir-size figurines of the Bronze Soldier, painted in the colors of various pop culture characters.

10 The project was shown in Arnis Balčus’s solo exhibitions at Street Level Photoworks Gallery in Glasgow, UK; at the Mūkusala Art Centre in Riga, Latvia (2014); at The Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic—European Centre for the Arts in Bialystok, Poland (2017); and at the Central European House of Photography in Bratislava, Slovakia (2018). It is also published as a photo book (Brave Books, 2016).

11 Sea of Living Memories, curated by Zane Onckule, was shown as a solo exhibition at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Latvia, and in Art in General, in New York, USA.

12 The exhibition was part of a larger project series, Communicating Difficult Pasts, co-curated by the author of this essay, Ieva Astahovska, and Estonian art scholar Margaret Tali. This ongoing project was initiated in 2018 while searching for new ways to research artistic practice that deals with twentieth and twenty-first-century history in the Baltic region. Its program has encompassed three larger elements, bringing together artists, scholars, and curators: 1) the summer school of the same name, held in Kuldīga, Latvia (2019); 2) the symposium Prisms of Silence, held in Tallinn at the Estonian Academy of Arts (2020); and 3) the abovementioned exhibition, held at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga (2020) and the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania (2022). In addition, as part of the project, we have edited a special issue of the Baltic Worlds journal (4/2020), “Confronting Muted Memories”. See http://balticworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/BW-2020-4-OA-VERSION-pdf.pdf.

13 The term “post-memory,” conceptualized by memory and feminist scholar Marianne Hirsch, initially referred to the relationship of the children of Holocaust survivors to their parents’ traumatic experiences. However, it has been applied to the much broader transgenerational impacts of traumatic histories, as a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. (See Hirsch 1997; Rothberg 2009)

14 The project Your Periphery is My Center (2011) included three exhibitions: Lost in Transition at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn; After Socialist Statues at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga; and Life in the Forest at the Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok, Poland.

15 Privately founded and financed, and with the internationally acclaimed curator Katerina Gregos as its face, the inaugural edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) was, in terms of institutional development and international visibility, the most remarkable art event in the region in that decade. The event took place from June till October 2018; with more than 100 artists whose works were exhibited in eight main venues in Riga and Jūrmala (a popular resort city near Riga), it also had an extensive public program. However, it also created a polarization between supporters and critics, who alleged that in their communication about the event in the context of the local art environment, its initiators and organizers, who were formerly unrelated to the Riga or Latvian art scene, expressed neocolonial views that were mixed with patronizing rhetoric about shifting the “backwardness” of the local art scene. (Hirša 2018, 2020)

16 The 10th edition of the festival, curated by the same team, was organized in two parts. The first introductory exhibition took place in the Riga Circus building in September 2018 and the second more extensive exhibition took place at the former Faculty of Physics, Mathematics, and Optometry of the University of Latvia in the Pārdaugava neighbourhood, on the west (left) bank of Daugava River in May 2019. It thus aimed to activate contemporary art life in neigborhoods outside the center.

17 The history of the Baltic Triennial goes back to 1978, when, titled the Baltic Young Artists’ Triennial in Vilnius, along with other Baltic exhibitions—the Tallinn Print Triennials (initiated in 1968), Vilnius Painting Triennials (1969–), and Riga Sculpture Quadrennials (1972–)—they carried on the regionalization policy of the Baltic states that were part of the Soviet Union at the time. Within the Soviet art hierarchies, these exhibitions formed a moderately unifying and at the same time separatist structure for artistic life and also intense artistic relations in this region for decades. (Soomre, Talvoja 2012, 149) After the restoration of independence in Lithuania in 1990, the triennial has been organized by the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) and its international aspect has been gradually expanded. Although it traditionally takes place in Vilnius, the 12th edition of the triennial (2015) was launched as three exhibitions in Vilnius, Riga, and Kraków. The 13th edition in 2018, which was artistically directed by Vincent Honoré and by a curatorial team comprised of Dina Akhmadeeva, Canan Batur, Neringa Bumblienė, Cédric Fauq, and Anya Harrison, took place across all three Baltic countries with an introductory event in London.