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However, neither identity, belonging, nor nationalism are fixed or self-contained notions and perceptions of their relevance for individuals and communities have also been changing. Contemporary art plays a significant role in mapping their complexity. In the following paragraphs I will therefore seek to sketch these dynamics through the works of different generations of artists, who have been reflecting, interpreting, and questioning national, political, social, gender, and other identities in the context of contemporary changes.

As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Baltic art in the 1990s was preoccupied with identity issues, as regional policy sought to strategically construct them. In the early 1990s, Baltic artists actively commented on identity through metaphors and allusions referring to the break with the Soviet era and to national self-determination, but also to historical injuries and scars left by the past. Such narrations were indicative, for instance, in several public artworks in an exhibition titled Monument,3 which mapped transformations in the political topography in Riga, displaying contemporary artworks in places where historical monuments once stood or had been planned. The installation Insect (1995) by Latvian artist Oļegs Tillbergs was a Soviet-era military plane turned upside down, in which the artist had placed a beehive, interpreting the USSR’s collapse as a radical change in power structures and the entire ecosystem of the post-Soviet realm. The image of the crashed plane—as a metaphor for collapsed imperial power—had also been used by the artist in other works in the late 1980s and ’90s. The bees, as a contrasting element, included a poetic message about the new living organisms, structures, societies, and even countries that have emerged instead of this “wreck.” Also in the exhibition, the installation Column (1995), constructed by Andris Breže from coal and firewood, used “living” and “non-living” natural materials to arouse associations with the transforming but also traumatic relationships of the past and present. Breže had used the “dialectic” of the materiality of wood and coal—as the principle of simultaneous duality and contrast—in several of his works. Through metaphors, subtexts, and double meanings on the transformation of time, these works used a characteristic expression of the art language of the last Soviet generation.

In the late 1990s, however, allegorical narratives about the Soviets as a foreign and colonizing power were already overshadowed by a conscious amnesia about the bygone era. This was, according to Russian curator Viktor Misiano, “a result of the traumatic break with the past, which seemed more productive than keeping relations with the collapsed time.” (Misiano 2011, 74) Aspects of postsocialist identity were now discussed through new social shifts and uneasy relations to it. As an example, a portrayal of the failed post-Soviet condition was brilliantly ironically manifested in one of the most emblematic works of this period, an autobiographical video titled Loser (1997), by Estonian artist Kai Kaljo.4 In the video, the artist stands in front of the camera and presents facts of her life in the form of brief statements such as “I am an Estonian artist,” “I am 37 years of age but still living with my mother,” and “I earn $90 a month.” Each of her statements is accompanied by canned laughter—as in Western TV sitcoms—as if suggesting that it might be funny to Western audiences to face a “loser” in the new capitalist context. Her last statement, “I believe the most important thing about being an artist is freedom,” which is commonly read in terms of its political implications, also included the so-called East European condition—the naiveté of the 1990s, the disillusionment of internationalism, and the aggressive capitalism that became a harsh reality for artists in the postsocialist world. (Untiks 2015, 65-76)

Kaljo’s work is often analyzed as a paradigmatic Eastern European feminist work and so, continuing to address its gender aspects, Estonian queer artist Anna-Stina Treumund paraphrased it fourteen years later in her work, titled Loser 2011 (2011).5 Treumund used the same format as Kaljo—a self-portrait, a short statement, and off-camera laughter. However, in this portrait, she adopted the role of a man who identifies with the normative, mainstream mindset—a construction worker, who announces that he has three children, all with different women, a four-room apartment, a car with leather seats, and that he hates immigrants and homosexuals. As Estonian art critic Hanno Soans remarked, Treumund turned Kaljo’s Loser around by stereotyping the stereotypical, and the laughter in her work was no longer liberating, but rather haunting, commenting on the shift in a society that has adopted western-style social pragmatism, but not a new system of social values. (Soans 2011, 19)

The conditions of the new capitalism—a desire to catch-up to the West while remaining the exotic “other”—were traced by Lithuanian artist Eglė Rakauskaitė in a work titled Gariūnai (2002).6 By picturing a Lithuanian open market that was claimed to be the largest in Europe at that time and through a simple documentation approach, the market in her work became a metaphor for the self-exoticization of post-Soviet capitalism. The video was tracing a regular working day, beginning in the dark as the market opens, moving through to sunrise then lunchtime. Its long, painterly frames and almost surrealistic composition and details, captured through an almost “orienting” gaze, were accompanied by an excerpt read by the artist from a tourist guidebook on Vilnius that was advertising a trip to the market as an adventurous place where one can find anything, “basically, all sorts of goods are available from cars to housewares to clothes to (so I’ve heard) guns.” By positioning herself as an ethnographer who studies and documents the reality of a transitional society, the artist simultaneously projected it through a perspective that distorts the projection of this reality. This approach, which involved both imitating the Western gaze towards former socialist subjects and the irony of it, was quite characteristic of Eastern European art at the time.

The documentary approach, which became typical of the 2000s in works focusing on aspects of post-Soviet identity, aimed to disclose and explore that identity’s heterogeneity. Seda. People of the Marsh (2004)7 by Latvian filmmaker and artist Kaspars Goba portrayed inhabitants of a small town in northern Latvia shortly before the referendum for Latvia’s accession to the EU. The town of Seda was established in the 1950s for peat mining workers, who were brought there from across the Soviet Union; after the fall of the USSR it turned into a remnant of the past, with most of the inhabitants being “non-citizens” who speak Russian and whose everyday life is “a bizarre mixture of Soviet traditions, Russian-Orthodox rituals and Latvian national holidays,” as the film’s synopsis explains. Deliberately forgotten by the re-established independent state, and with an unclear future, to the inhabitants of Seda—whose Stalinist architecture and railway could potentially lend themselves to tourism rather than the peat industry—the integration into EU structures did not seem a desirable prospect. The work therefore commented on a peculiar postcolonial situation—once formed as part of the USSR’s colonial economic and migration project, now, the town and its inhabitants were postsocialist “others,” forgotten and neglected as an unwilling consequence of occupation policy. However, now they were part of an independent state, as people who belong not to their ethnic homelands, but to Latvia.

Other works by Goba had also portrayed socially or historically marginalized individuals and communities: Roma families, participants of one of the first Gay Pride events in Riga in the mid-2000s, and the first refugees who stayed in Latvia, trying to settle into local society. These works poignantly exposed the problems of the young democracy, whose inhabitants face xenophobia, intolerance, racism, and exclusion. Thus, Goba’s works were not only about these people, whom society does not want to see, but were about that society itself, which is reluctant to accept the changes associated with “otherness.”

The new political and economic identities, traced in these art works, vividly reveal also a postcolonial paradox, which the Belarusian writer, the Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich has summarized in a brief statement: “Socialism has ended, but we are still here.” Life in the “new, brave world” in the first postsocialist decades was rather marked with the disappearance of illusions about its openness, and adaptation to the Western models of capitalism came not only with benefits, but also with many losses and new challenges.