Ieva Astahovska: Mapping Transformations in the Baltic Art

• In Event: Panel series: Crossroads of Baltic Historical Research: Post-Soviet transformations and the real challenge of expanding the field / Panel II: Discovering the “Other”

Abstract

How can artistic research and practice in the Baltic region engage in mapping its symptomatic social, political, environmental and ecological change? How do they reflect historically and currently relevant aspects related to these changes? What concepts and perspectives, discourses and approaches can be helpful to untangle the complexity of these processes?
In my presentation, I would like to address these questions through two case studies, still ongoing art projects which foreground the historical implications of the region and their impacts today. The project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” aims at understanding the relationships between the difficult and traumatic pasts and their contemporary legacies by focusing on the connections between Baltic States and its neigbouring regions. The project “Reflecting Post-Socialism through Post-Colonialism in the Baltics”, however, seeks to analyse the imprints of post-socialism and post-colonialism in the Baltic region, exploring them through the prism of environmental history and the current ecological crisis. In these projects, which I’m co-curating together with other Baltic colleagues, we look for novel ways and also new sensibilities and reflexivity to dealing with the historical and contemporary realities of the Baltic region. Both projects aim to strengthen transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations, to facilitate exchange and discussions, and create synergies between artists, curators and researchers. Essential layer of both projects is reflection of post-socialist and postcolonial entanglements, exploring their complexity through such notions as otherness, hybridity, or suture in order to better understand the complex or even paradoxical nature of the transformations in the Baltic region.

Author

• Ieva Astahovska, Art Academy of Latvia