Category: Faculty of Art and Culture

Online launch of Memory Studies journal Special issue “The Return of Suppressed Memories in Eastern Europe: Locality and Unsilencing Difficult Histories”

Online launch on Facebook

29 September 17.00–18.30 EEST time, 16.00–17.30 CET time and 15.00–16.30 BST time
How are suppressed memories returning in Eastern Europe? What role does locality play in this process? How has this process been theorized and studied? And what kind of impact has Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine had to these articulations?

We are happy to invite you to the online launch of the recent Memory Studies journal Special Issue “The Return of Suppressed Memories in Eastern Europe: Locality and Unsilencing Difficult Histories” that was published in June 2022! During the launch authors will briefly introduce their articles that were published in the special issue by focusing on the notion of locality, one of the main keywords in this issue. The response of memory scholar Natalija Arlauskaitė will follow.

The special issue is part of the project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” (2019–2023), a project initiated by Estonian Academy of Arts and Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and curated by Margaret Tali and Ieva Astahovska, who are also the editors of this Memory Studies Special issue. It grows out of the symposium Prisms of Silence organized in Tallinn, Estonian Academy of Arts in 2020.

Participants: Roma Sendyka (Jagiellonian University/Humboldt University), Asja Mandić (University of Sarajevo), Shelley Hornstein (York University), Mischa Twitschin (Goldsmiths, University of London), Ieva Astahovska (Latvian Centre for Contemporary Arts) and Margaret Tali (Estonian Academy of Arts). Natalija Arlauskaitė (Vilnius University) will act as a respondent.

The ESA Conference 2022 is to be held on 28–30 June 2022 at Estonian Academy of Arts (Põhja puiestee 7) in Tallinn. 

The keynote speakers:

Professor Emmanuel Alloa (University of Fribourg)

Professor Pauline von Bonsdorff (University of Jyväskylä)

Professor Virve Sarapik (Estonian Academy of Arts)

Info

Seminar Likeness in Difference. Perspectives on Baltic Regional Art History 

Location: Estonian Academy of Arts, Kumu Art Museum
The working language at the seminar is English.

The seminar jointly organised by Estonian Academy of Arts and the Art Museum of Estonia brings together art researchers and curators from the three Baltic countries. The art history of the Soviet period serves as the point of departure for the seminar.

The regional, comparative, and international focus on an analysis of cultural practices and the respective institutional conditions establishes a basis for presentations on both shared and individual experiences, facilitates studying their causes and backgrounds, and helps to challenge the established narratives that we construct and reproduce about our own art histories and those of others.

The meanings and self-understanding of the Baltics as a geopolitical and cultural region have changed several times throughout history. In the field of culture, the frequent interaction between the three Baltic republics in the Soviet time was replaced by narratives of national independence in the 1990s. Because of the polarised world perception of the Cold War era, the three countries sought to define themselves through these narratives as part of either Eastern Europe or the West. Therefore, their interest in one another and the sense of shared regional characteristics remained in the background for quite some time. Nevertheless, the last few years have witnessed changes in several spheres (of culture), which have served as a launch pad for a more active and productive dialogue.

The two-day seminar has been divided into six panels. Topics vary from photography and studies of the heritage of women artists to analyses of Soviet exhibition activities and experimental art practices. Presentations will also deal with real and imaginary art collectives and pose future-oriented questions about potential trans-Baltic research topics, exhibition projects and new theoretical approaches that provide the necessary framework. The aim is to explore intersections between the participants’ research interests and activities, and to prepare a foundation for future cooperation projects.

‘Likeness in Difference – Perspectives on Baltic Regional Art History’
Digital Thesis PDF

More info + the programme

Event on Facebook

Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds

With the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the past has returned in Eastern Europe, changing from something distant into a present-day disaster for millions of people. The invasion that started in 2014 with Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk was often dismissed by the international community, but it has now grown into a situation that is affecting the whole world. This war hits Eastern Europe most alarmingly, reviving many silences, unhealed wounds and unprocessed memories of the totalitarian past.

We are used to thinking about past times through the lens of national histories, with their selective, smoothed and linear narrations, instead of the plural, messy and nonlinear stories shared in daily life. The difficult sides of these histories have often been neglected; instead, comforting stories are told that stress positive narratives and ways of overcoming challenges. This exhibition brings together difficult and often-silenced aspects of pasts that include violent conflicts, traumatic losses and their long-term legacies. The difficult pasts addressed here involve nationalist and communist regimes, recent warfare and histories of colonialism, the uneasy balances between modes of survival and collaboration and the ongoing specificities of post-soviet societies coping with the shadows of the past.

 Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds includes works by artists from the three Baltic countries, Ukraine, Poland, Finland and the Netherlands. The experiences the works evoke are ones that are often forgotten or ignored, excluded from official histories. Artists included in the exhibition narrate those experiences through individual stories, while evoking broader layers of cultural memory. What is the place of these stories in the present? How could we integrate them in our understanding of history? What do they change in our perception of the world around us? Overcoming local and national borders, the exhibition calls for reflection on the relationships between difficult pasts and their impact today through the perspective of a shared history-opening dialogue, forging connections and foregrounding solidarities between the different difficult histories that are often perceived as incompatible or in competition with each other.

The exhibition was first shown in 2020 at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, as part of Communicating Difficult Pasts, an international project which engages with the uncomfortable and often forgotten sides of history in order to understand their influences in the Baltic region and neighboring countries. The project has fostered collaboration and synergy between artists, curators and researchers who seek new approaches and means to study difficult legacies and to overcome their omission. The current exhibition is organized within the framework of the project From Complicated Past Towards Shared Futures, which is a collaboration between the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (Lithuanian National Museum of Art), OFF-Biennale in Budapest, Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, and Malmö Art Museum. The project seeks to explore and communicate the entanglements of past and present, and is searching for new ways how art and culture can raise awareness of these issues for the wider public and influence current realities.

Curators: Ieva Astahovska, Margaret Tali, Eglė Mikalajūnė

Artists: Anastasia Sosunova, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Jaana Kokko, Laima Kreivytė, Lia Dostlieva & Andrii Dostliev, Matīss Gricmanis & Ona Juciūtė, Quinsy Gario & Mina Ouaouirst, Paulina Pukytė, Ülo Pikkov, Vika Eksta, Zuzanna Hertzberg

Exhibition design: Jonas Žukauskas

Graphic design: Alexey Murashko

Organized by: Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art (Lithuanian National Museum of Art)

The project is financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture

Supported by: European Union Programme “Creative Europe”, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Nordic Council of Ministers, Mondriaan Fund, Fundermax, Exterus

Media sponsor: lrytas.lt

Online discussion “Political emancipation of artistic practices in Ukraine” 

On 16 March at 18:00—20:00 EEST

The discussion will be live streamed on Facebook.

Join us for an online discussion, where artists, curators and researchers from Ukraine will talk about their works dealing with the entanglements of past and present, memory and cultural decolonization.

Participants: Svitlana Biedarieva, Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev, Nikolay Karabinovich, Olia Mykhailiuk, Lada Nakonechna, Kateryna Botanova.

Moderators: Ieva Astahovska and Linda Kaljundi

Since 24 February, the world has desparately followed the war started by Russian president Putin in Ukraine justifying his aggressive invasion of the neighboring country with the need to “defend itself”, “denazify” Ukraine and “protect people who have been subject to abuse and genocide by the regime in Kyiv”. In his hour-long televised speech announcing the attack, Putin manipulated notions of 20th century and especially WWII history, denied that Ukraine has ever had “real statehood,” and stated that the country was an integral part of Russia’s “own history, culture, and spiritual space.” The falsification of history used to invade an independent state, assert power, and justify his imperial megalomania, has suddenly transformed war in Europe from a thing of the past into an urgent catastrophe of unprecedented scale for millions of people in the 21st century.

The war in Ukraine began in 2014 with Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine. Already at that time, cultural resistance played an essential role alongside political protests. “What the artists did next to the barricades, sandwiches, hospitals, and Molotov cocktails was also a form of survival art, careful and scrupulous, often anonymous documentation of day-to-day activities. It was the art of action, of intervention in the physical and political reality to affect the symbolic one,” writes Ukrainian cultural critic, curator, and writer Kateryna Botanova. “Artistic practices engaged and laid the ground for a different kind of society based on a common fight and, at the same time, care and solidarity.”

After the Maidan Uprising (2013), many contemporary Ukrainian artists continued to work with difficult, debated and traumatic issues, among them searches for identity, memory wars, changing geopolitical affiliations, “documenting and empowering the voices of the other, telling the stories of those unseen and disempowered, articulating history not as a politically curated linear narrative serving the purpose of nation-building but as a layered and conflicting array of forgotten stories.” Collecting, accumulating, and articulating these issues of society’s blind spots, these artists have been building a critical mass of knowledge that are essential in building “a political nation capable of embracing multiple identities, on the foundations of traumatic experiences of the Soviet collectivity and post-Soviet aggressive individuality, colonial recasting of identities and post-colonial national take-over, Soviet totalitarianism and post-Soviet authoritarianism,” as Kateryna Botanova sums up.

The discussion is part of the project “Reflecting Post-Socialism through Postcolonialism in the Baltics”, which analyses the imprints of post-socialism and post-colonialism in the region. The programme is organized by the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art in Riga in collaboration with Kumu Art Museum, and it is curated by Ieva Astahovska and Linda Kaljundi.

The event is supported by the Nep4Dissent Research Network, an EU COST Action Association.

 ABSTRACTS AND PRESENTER BIOS

Olia Mykhailiuk, “rememberMINT”

“rememberMINT” is a subjective multidimensional collage of poetic lines, documentary interviews, and photo/video essays from Donechchyna and Luhanshchyna, and performance. It is an attempt to explore the mechanisms of memory. When there are no more words, movements remain. When movements stop — smell remains. When people die — grass sprouts.

Many people find it difficult to forget times of hardship. But my memory, with no effort made, does not return me to where it was scary. In August 2014, I happened to be in the occupied Alchevsk for a while. There grew a lot of mint in the yard. When the world narrowed down to one backyard… we brewed mint tea. Sometimes a sunbeam fell through the window in the ceiling into the glass cup. Mint helps some to calm down and reconcile with their own memories, while it helps others, those who tend to forget, to recall. But I do not aim to cure everyone. Everyone has his own grass.

Olia Mykhailiuk lives and works in Kyiv. In 2007, teamed up with other like-minded people and founded ArtPole Agency in order to unite artists working in various areas—painters, musicians, performers, writers. Developed the concepts and initiated several notable multidisciplinary projects, both Ukrainian and international. She continues to work on the development of interaction between various art disciplines, particularly performance, music, literature and video art. In performance, she often tries to study the primal senses of words by referring to her own system of emotional signs and symbols.

Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev

Cultural decolonisation in our practice

In our practice, we have been consistently working on establishing a discursive space that would enable the recontextualisation of cultural and historical processes in the context of the decolonisation of Ukrainian culture from the dominant external imperial narrative. We will show several examples of our works that use these optics while looking at the Ukrainian past and present.

Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev are artists from Ukraine, currently based in Poznań, Poland.

Lia is also cultural anthropologist and essayist. The primary areas of her research are trauma, post-memory and agency of vulnerable groups. She works in a wide range of media, including photography, installations and textile sculptures, and has exhibited her works in Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Austria and elsewhere.

Andrii is also photography researcher and curator. He has degrees in IT and Graphic Design. His primary areas of interest are memory, trauma and identity—both personal and collective. He works in various media and has exhibited his works in Ukraine, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

Lada Nakonechna,
“Disciplined Vision”

“Disciplined Vision” is the title of an exhibition of Lada Nakonechna in the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU). Looking at artifacts of the Socialist Realist tradition from the NAMU’s archives, library, and collection as testimony, it proposes examining the role of art in shaping judgments about history. For they are the shared aspect of culture that determines the present.
The paradox of the visual culture of the Soviet Union lies in the implicit violence in the affirmative, positive images that spring from general humanist values (emancipation, mutual respect, love for one’s native land, etc.). Expositions of Ukrainian Museums mainly continue chronological unfolding of the history of art that played a role in constructing unyielding logic of history. Disciplined Vision examines how the representation of Ukraine in Socialist Realist tradition still forms the consciousness of people.

Lada Nakonechna is an artist and researcher. In addition to her personal practice, she is involved in a number of group projects and collectives. She is a member of the R.E.P. group (since 2005), part of the curatorial and activist union Hudrada (since 2008), cofounder of Method Fund (2015) and co-curator of its educational and research programs. In 2016 she also joined the new editorial board of the Internet journal of art, literature and politics Prostory.net.ua. Nakonechna’s artworks, which often take the form of installations incorporating drawing, photographs and text, call attention to methods of recognition and reveal the internal aspects of visual and verbal structures. Her latest artistic investigations are based on artistic and archival materials related to the art of Socialist Realism—understood as a “method” and institutional and educational system. In 2014 she received the Kazimir Malevich Art Award.

Nikolay Karabinovych, “In the beginning there was the rhythm”

Brief history of Ukraine 1991–2021.

A few stories, few videos and 3 artworks.

Nikolay Karabinovych lives and works in Kyiv and Brussels. The artist works in a variety of media, including video, sound, text, and performance. In 2020 and 2018, he was awarded the first PinchukArtCentre Special Prize. From 2019 he is studying at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. In 2017, Karabinovych was an assistant curator of the 5th Odessa Biennale. His work has been shown at M HKA, Antwerp, PinchukArtCentre Kyiv, Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center Moscow, Museum of Modern Art, Odessa.

Svitlana Biedarieva

Viewing postcolonial entanglements in Ukraine through Latin American lens: Beyond “At the Front Line”

My presentation will focus on linking points between Ukrainian and Mexican art scenes. It will explore the notions of ambiguity and hybridity in the two regional contexts and will take on two different models of colonial and decolonial processes. I will compare the questions of (post)memory, memory wars, violence, and historical trauma in the discussion of art projects.

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, artist, and curator with an interest in Eastern European and Latin American art. Her edited books include “Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021” (ibidem Press 2021), “At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (Mexico City: Editorial 17, 2020, co-edited with Hanna Deikun). Biedarieva’s papers have been published by, among other outlets, Space and Culture (SAGE), Art Margins Online (MIT Press), and Revue Critique d’Art (University of Rennes 2). She obtained her PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in 2020.

Kateryna Botanova is a Ukrainian cultural critic, curator, and writer based in Basel. She is a co-curator of CULTURESCAPES, Swiss multidisciplinary biennial, and is an editor of the critical anthologies that accompany each festival. She was a director of CSM/Foundation Center for Contemporary Art, in Kyiv, where, in 2010, she launched and edited Korydor, the online journal on contemporary culture. She has worked extensively with EU Eastern Partnership Culture Program and EUNIC Global as a consultant and expert. A member of PEN Ukraine, she publishes widely on art and culture.

The exhibition “Open Windows” will reopen on the windows of the Library of EKA on February 21, at 4 pm.

Through the exhibition of EKA windows, different specialities of EKA introduce their most outstanding projects and the latest creations of students. The exhibition can be viewed on the windows of the EKA Library on Põhja pst and Kotzebue streets and will remain open until March 14.

Specialities represented: Installation and Sculpture, Room Design, Product and Environmental design, Visual Communication, Photography, Jewellery and Blacksmithing, Scenography, Fashion Design, Textile Design, Accessory Design, Graphics, Graphic Design, Animation, Ceramics, Industrial and Digital Product Design, Glass, Architecture, Interior Design, Painting, Art and Visual Culture, Cultural Heritage and Conservation

The exhibition of open windows of EKA made its debut in 2021 and received a warm welcome from those interested in art and art education. The Estonian Academy of Arts, located on the edge of Kalamaja, will once again enliven the city’s cultural landscape at street level. Get with it! 

The exhibition “Remake” of EKA Art Education students can be seen on the information screens of EKA from January 14 to February 4.

The works of the art education students were completed within the “Creative project” subject .

Artists: Inga Ausmeel, Liina Oja, Liina Raidoja, Marju Rajasalu, Lilli-Krõõt Repnau, Triin Resik, Tanel Roomere, Piret Suviste, Zhanna Toht, Kertu Tort, Kalev Vapper, Merle Vingerfeld, Viire Jagomägi

Supervised by Anna-Kaisa Vita

The works can be seen on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th floors of EKA and on the screen of the auditorium on the Kotzebue street side. Videos with sound on the 2nd floor screen. 

More about EKA Art Education studies

The first solo exhibition of the artist Helena Tääker “Surgery of the Soul” will be opened in Vent Space on November 28 at 6 pm.

The curator of the exhibition is Ketlin Käpp. 

On November 25th at 5.30 pm, Dan Karlholm from Södertörn University will give a lecture “The Climate of Art History” at the Estonian Academy of Arts (room A-501).

Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s classic essay “The Climate of History”, where he argues that world history and earth history must be seen as conjoined histories, the lecture discusses art history through the lens of climate change, how our discipline is impacted by the “New Climatic Regime” and how it can contribute to ecologizing the world.

Dan Karlholm is Professor of Art History, Södertörn University. Karlholm is founder (with Charlotte Bydler and Håkan Nilsson as co-founders) of the Art History Department at Södertörn University in 2003. He is also editor of Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History (Taylor & Francis/Routledge) since 2009. Karlholms research interests revolve around historiography, including the history and theory of art history in Sweden, Germany and in general, as well as museum studies, visual culture studies, and the issue of temporality and contemporaneity. Research projects in recent years have dealt with contemporary art from various perspectives.

Lecture will be held in English.
Covid certificates will be checked at the entrance of the lecture hall, masks are obligatory.

Lecture is supported by the ASTRA project of the Estonian Academy of Arts – EKA LOOVKÄRG (European Union, European Regional Development Fund).

Greta Koppel, PhD student of the Estonian Academy of Arts, curriculum of Art History and Visual Culture, will defend her thesis „Farewell to Connoisseurship? The Work of Art in the Focus of Art Historical Research” („Hüvasti, konossöörlus? Kunstiteos kui kunstiajaloolise uurimise kese“) on 10th of December 2021 at 15.00 at Põhja pst 7, room A501.

Limited number of audience can participate on-site, please register HERE
Please provide certificate of vaccination or recovery from COVID-19.

The defense will be held in Estonian.

Supervisor: Prof.  Krista Kodres (Estonian Academy of Arts)
External reviewers: Dr. Anu Mänd (Tallinn University), Dr. Jaanika Anderson (University of Tartu Museum)
Opponent: Dr. Anu Mänd

This dissertation (Farewell to Connoisseurship? The Work of Art in the Focus of Art Historical Research) deals with problems related to the study of the art of the Old Masters. The research paper reflects the author’s experience based on years of researching and curating Early Modern art at the museum. Works of art as musealised objects have played a central role in this work.

The dissertation emphasises that a multifaceted study based on a close study of works of art that takes into account each work as a whole, i.e. its material and intellectual sides, enables us to obtain valuable information for the study of a particular object but also for analysing broader historical and cultural phenomena. In the case of old works of art, connoisseurship is a significant component of such research. The author introduces the concept of connoisseurship, which is almost unknown as a professional term in Estonia, provides a survey of the long history of connoisseurship as a competence of recognising art(ists), discusses the closely intertwined relationship between modern connoisseurship and technical art history, introduces the specifics of the research method, and explains why this skill is irreplaceable in identifying the authors of works of art and why this competence is worth preserving in art history practice even if one has no interest in the question of the author. It also explains how the critical analysis of the connoisseurship method makes it possible to better understand the specifics of art history as a humanistic discipline. The section on connoisseurship is followed by three case studies related to the author’s curatorial practice at the Art Museum of Estonia, which illustrate the importance of connoisseurship as an object-led, multifaceted close study of works of art in art historical research. The first case discusses the problems of reconstructing the oeuvre of Michel Sittow (ca 1469 – 1525), an itinerant painter from Tallinn; in the second, 16th century Netherlandish Boschian art is the focus, and the last case, research on Johannes Mikkel’s (1907–2006) collection, emphasises its value as historical documentation.

Members of the Defence Council: Prof. Virve Sarapik, Dr. Anu Allas, Dr. Anneli Randla, Prof. Juhan Maiste, Prof. Marek Tamm, Prof. Tõnu Viik, Dr. Kadi Polli

Please find the PhD thesis HERE