Staying with the Difficulty, Struggling for Connectivity

• Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds, curated by Margaret Tali and Ieva Astahovska, Tallinn Art Hall, Lasnamäe Pavilion (August–October 2024)

I have followed the project Communicating Difficult Pasts with growing interest. It was initiated in 2018 by Margaret Tali and Ieva Astahovska, curators and researchers from Estonia and Latvia respectively¹. From its onset, it has investigated ways to curatorially address the changing memory of the Baltic region vis-a-vis more broadly European or even global discussions on the heritage of various imperialisms and colonialisms, the exploitation of human and non-human animals, industrial and techno-capitalism, genocidal authoritarianism, recurrent fascisms, institutional racism, and systemic violence against women and various minoritarian groups.²

The task Tali and Astahovska have set for themselves – as well as the many others whom they have invited over the years to discuss, exchange ideas, challenge solutions, and reformulate diagnoses – is not so much to reject the frameworks, categories, and vocabularies developed in Western academia and museums, but rather to scrutinize them and to locally (in the Baltic countries but with the participation of neighbors) and collectively (bonded with others by various solidarities) extract and retrieve other frames of reference, concepts, and notions. I see their undertaking as a form of exercising the right to potential history,³ what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay has perceived as “an effort to create new conditions both for the appearance of things and for our appearance as its narrators, as the ones who can – at any given moment – intervene in the order of [past] things.”⁴ The dynamic of the project spans between a potential that lays dormant in the past and the potential for present and future lives that can be embraced once the past possibilities emerge from still frames and stale narratives. As Azoulay argues:

On the one hand, it signifies the reconstruction of unrealized possibilities, practices, and dreams that motivated and directed the actions of various actors in the past. These were not fully realized but rather disrupted by the constitution of a sovereign regime that created a differential and conflictive body politic. On the other hand, it means the transformation of the past into an unending event, into what Benjamin has called incomplete history […].⁵

The other concept that Azoulay relates to in the context of Middle Eastern Jewish-Arab history – but, I would argue, that could as well be employed in relation to other geopolitical contexts – is that of “relational history,” which stresses the importance of relations and their histories over the history of elements (of one nation, one group, one region), and shifts from the study of internal dynamics to that of interactions.⁶ This is precisely what Communicating Difficult Pasts does.

When following the work of Tali and Astahovska, I could not resist yielding to an uncanny temporality of recall within our neighboring visual and memory cultures, whereby the images, figures, gestures, and remnants of the past return and become restlessly present. This causes a sense of confusion – the coordinates hitherto organizing the social and mnemonic environments have been disturbed or ceased to work. Such confusion can be both destructive and creative if, as collectives, we let ourselves part with familiar frameworks for understanding the aftermath of past events in the region, and present catastrophic events more globally.

Over the course of these years, slowly yet systematically, a crisis of collective identities shaped by post-war memory has unfolded. Some elements have seemed impossible to reconcile. Increasingly, unwelcome ambiguities transpire through the otherwise impenetrable screen on which collective identity is projected. Communicating Difficult Pasts survived some major concussions: the exhibition for the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga (November 2020–February 2021)⁷ was prepared under the great duress and insecurity of the COVID-19 pandemic, which finally forced the curators to close the show prematurely. As the project was developing, outraged Belarussian citizens protested following the forged results of the August 9, 2020 presidential election and the mismanagement of the COVID pandemic by state authorities, among other grievances. These were the largest protests in the history of independent Belarus, with tens of thousands repressed, imprisoned, beaten, etc.

The second presentation, co-curated with Eglė Mikalajūnė, for the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (April–August 2022),⁸ opened just two months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which turned the eyes of the international public back to Eastern Europe, with the resurgence of a conflict seemingly long past. Yet, as the curators rightly point out, the attack on Ukrainian sovereignty had begun eight years earlier in Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk, and should have impacted our sense of peace more than it did. When the exhibition was mounted in Lithuania’s capital, numerous open wounds, painful scars, and untold stories of the region’s silenced inhabitants began to pulsate with new pain – be it one’s own or inherited. The potential public for the show expanded as more and more refugees (both from Ukraine and Russia) came and stayed in neighboring countries, bringing with them stories of dependence, violence, and expulsion. A side story, yet one whose consequences for the mingling of lives and memories in the region cannot be ignored, is that of the humanitarian crisis at the Polish-Belarussian border, with refugees from Africa and the Middle East struggling to make it through the primaeval forest, suffering and dying, with humanitarian aid being criminalized and social indifference normalized. The region where the refugees are struggling for survival, Podlasie, is the same region where, eighty years ago, Polish Jews also tried to hide and survive. Again, past and present blend.⁹

With the third exhibition, in the Lasnamäe Pavilion of the Tallinn Art Hall (August–October 2024), the world’s eyes turned to Gaza, then to Lebanon, and local discussion on the legacy of the Nazi genocide of European Jews during World War II and the shape of public memories in the Baltic and Central-Eastern European regions, as well as in the so-called “West,” began to include voices of disquiet regarding the weaponization and instrumentalization of Holocaust memory for the state politics of Israel and its expanding occupation of Palestine. On the one hand, more and more mainstream conversation has turned to Jewish violence against Arabs and to the uses and abuses of the allegation of antisemitism. On the other hand, one witnesses the palpable effects of antisemitism and anti-Arab racism. Students have protested, demanding acknowledgement of their governments’ complicity and their societies’ implicatedness in what they regard as unfolding genocide (the “never again” is now). This is an important moment for cultural workers, artists, and academics to reflect upon the possible weaponization of their work and their sincere engagement in producing tools for oppressive politics.¹⁰ It was in the pink pavilion in the working-class neighborhood of Lasnamäe, inhabited predominantly by Russian-speaking Soviet-era immigrants, with blocks of flats constructed in the 1970–1990s, that I visited the show.¹¹

If never again is indeed now, or maybe even has been for a while, an exhibition about difficult pasts and post-traumatic connectivity may seem both scandalous and necessary. It could be regarded as an excess if exhibiting art at times of human and natural catastrophes simply meant distraction from the political and social reality, or an avoidance of confrontation with violence in the refuge art may offer. However, what Tali and Astahovska have provided is an evolving space for encounters with all the latent and awoken horrors of history. It is a space for knowledge formation and transfer, and also for performing affective detachments and new attachments – what the curators call “solidarity and empathy” in history, which is always actualized by an encounter in an art space. Their exhibitions are elements and stages of a research project that questions their status quo as sites for art presentation, elements that intersect with others: summer schools, symposia, workshops, and edited monographic issues.

As Anne Rigney pointed out, “the creative arts can be seen as catalysts in creating new memories, supplementing what has been documented with imaginative power and creatively using cultural forms to generate vibrant (if not always literally true) stories that may then be picked up and reworked in other disciplines.”¹² The many disciplines and their representatives have been consequently invited to participate in the project over the years. One could say that the curators have worked according to a “multiscalar approach to the past”¹³ which accommodates various “scales and contexts of memory and metamemory production,”¹⁴ as well as numerous and diverse forms of addressing the past and making it present and meaning-full.

In their essay entitled How to Talk about Cultural Trauma through Art, or, Working With Difficult Pasts, written for post.moma.org, Tali and Astahovska stress the necessity of developing local – rather than implementing Western – categories of description and conceptualization of the Baltic cultural memory of violence and conflict, or historical dependencies and traumas – the “Baltic region of memory.”¹⁵ Thus, their curatorial practice should be read both as a decolonial gesture – a move outside Westernized art and academic institutions, which can be both courageous and risky – and as intersectional or trans-sectional, in that it looks at the post-Soviet past and its memory in relation and as connected to the colonial and decolonial past. The curators’ call for connectedness and solidarity invites the memory of transnational struggles for freedom. It acknowledges present-day conditions of the neoliberal logic of art and academic institutions, where research on difficult pasts has been performed by artists, critics, curators, and academics (both of universities and art schools).¹⁶ Their practice is relational, in that it has not aimed to create and curate an exclusive and autonomous regional cultural memory, but rather to visit and uncover numerous interdependencies and neighborly relationships with other conceptual and geographic territories, such as Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Nordic region, etc.¹⁷

The curators wanted this connectivity to be acknowledged, taken care of, and put to work through a conversation in the museum space which they therefore designed and designated for reflexivity, fostering critical empathy as a dominant affect. Let me discuss briefly how some of the works in the show “converse,” and let me begin “from home.”

Polish Jewish artivist Zuzanna Hertzberg’s Volunteers for Freedom (2016–2020) is a research-based installation offering an encounter with female fighters in the International Brigades opposing General Francisco Franco and the Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Subject to antisemitism and sexism in their countries of origin (Poland and Lithuania), they joined the struggle against fascism and violent dominance. With her gesture, Hertzberg establishes a heritage of female and also feminist Jewish activism, so crucial for her own and many others’ artistic and political formations today. Hertzberg created a series of wooden folded boxes, each “in memory” of a respective protagonist, including archival documents – both visual and textual – collaged with the artist’s drawings, paintings, and fabric-based elements. Each of the boxes forms an intimate, nomadic museum or, better said, a memorial chamber that can be studied, carried, and placed in various sites and beside various stories of resistance and solidarity.

Conversations with Dad (2020) by Latvian artist Vika Eksta reveals the layers of pain transmitted silently from one generation to another. The artist’s father was drafted to participate in the late-Soviet-era Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989), a war that was as ferocious as it is almost entirely forgotten, which cost the lives of over 15,000 Soviet and nearly one million Afghan civilians. The young men who returned to the Baltic republics carried with them the brutalization and pain they caused and experienced, wounds that have not been cared for but rather left to oblivion. In her installation, Eksta attempts to establish a connection both with the past and with her father. She has created a space of feeling and mutual understanding of what was, but also of a logic of disappearance within broader histories of violence. The soldiers who returned home brought the war with them, and were abandoned by those who had orchestrated it, as were their sons and daughters, who lived in the shadow of an event unavailable to them. By sharing her personal history, Eksta cracks open the archive that holds and is being held by the injustice of abandonment. The artist refuses to participate, and yet her refusal is modest, low-key, and as such very powerful.

Another “family frame” is opened by Yaniya Mikhalina, a Volga Tatar female documentary artist with Muslim heritage who lives and works in Oslo, and studies in Trodheim researching “the a-topias of colonial madness: Feminist-indigenous cosmologies.” In her work for Communicating Difficult Pasts, entitled Munajats of Mähirä (2024) she turns to the legacy of her grandmother Mähirä, especially her resistant singing, in Tatar, of songs called “munajats” – an Urdu form of whispered poetry speaking of repentance and sin – in times when the practice of both Islam and the Tatar language was forbidden by the Soviet authorities in the Volga-Ural region. Mikhalina reconnects with the female history of her family, and moves potential Tatar histories to the forefront of reflection on the past of the region and its neighbors.

The exhibition avoids oversimplified identifications and courageously foregrounds the questions: who can tell whose stories, and what motivates us to avoid responsibility for the stories of others or contrarily to take care for them? Jaana Kokko, a Finnish female artist and, importantly in this context, a mother, researched the life and work of Hella Wiolijoki (1886–1954), a Finnish-Estonian writer and political activist, born in the Valga/Valka borderland to where Kokko traveled in search of the traces of her past. During her visits to a town inhabited today by Latvians and Estonians, the artist followed the thread of motherhood and the mothers’ experience of history – accompanied by her daughter. In the testimonies of local women, Kokko encountered the troubling absence of their Roma neighbors, the whole neighborhood, who had lost their lives in the Nazi genocide. She followed that thread, too. What strikes one about her digressive work is how freely she combines these threads; she gleans the stories as she traverses the archive and the landscape. Time must be spent with the work in order to make sense of the fabric of this narrative.

I have chosen these four female artists to stress the prominence of female voices in the show and its feminist perspective, both on the artistic and curatorial levels. This viewpoint not only concentrates on the women’s pasts, their historical consciousness, and their absence from dominant narratives, but also, even more crucially, it offers a certain corrective to our historical imageries, and the powers that ordinarily structure the temporalities and topographies of our historicity. One striking shift was toward the peripheral whiteness of Baltic people. Even if indirectly, some works in the show addressed whiteness as something relational, something performed in a space of assumed innocence.

The exhibitions also included projects and interventions by Anastasia Sosunova (LT); Eléonore de Montesquiou (FR/EE); Laima Kreivytė (LT); Lia Dostlieva & Andrii Dostliev (UA/PL); Matīss Gricmanis (LV) & Ona Juciūtė (LT); Quinsy Gario & Mina Ouaouirst (NL); Paulina Pukytė (LT/GB); Ülo Pikkov (EE); and Tanel Rander (ES). All of them speak to the problems I have tried to collect in a constellation of questions, as they, too, pose and complicate questions rather than offer answers.

What is so difficult about the recall of past violence or trauma? Do works of art relating to these issues need to be difficult? Should difficulty always be overcome, and when can it be embraced? What might staying with the difficulty mean? What is difficult to accept in the shared realm of memory? Whose memories remain unwelcome or even unacceptable and why, and who decides on the rules of inclusion/exclusion? Which memories are difficult to share – and is it because access to the archive is blocked, or is it the affective organization of our institutions and imaginations that cause it? What cannot be reconciled within the history of the region? What is the museums’ role in the process of keeping the difficulty alive and in place – productive, not disruptive?

Each present moment always demands from us rethinking what counts as history, which episodes from the past are included and celebrated, perceived as formative, which ones we willingly ignore (and whether art can play a role in this process). Which connections among which histories (of historical actors or sites) do we find easy to imagine and which still seem unimaginable? How do we give voice, make conversation without exercising our dominance, and how do we listen to minoritarian voices? Where and how can they be heard? How do we encounter archives of the histories of violence? How do we approach these archives in the making? What response do they demand from us? How do we practice the memory of past wars and conflicts when wars and conflicts that implicate us in one way or another are present and ongoing? How is this present condition different from previous ones (and again, what role is played by art)?

Meandering through the exhibition several times and in different directions, I encountered some fugitive and subtle intimations whose political and ethical message was never too obvious or undemanding. They invited both attention and effort, which I liked, but also risked being missed or dismissed.

The exhibition tested the idea of expanding the “public” of public memory, allowing for the imagining of memory alliances over competitions, allowing the associations of events and experiences from various contexts of violence. These have been suggested to us by the artworks or interventions themselves, encouraging us to “unlearn” the rules and acknowledge the boundaries of academic experimental thinking. As the editors of Essays in Migratory Aesthetics claim:

Aesthetic practices – and artists – are subject to multiple cultural, political and economic constraints. And yet aesthetic practices often gain their force precisely through their contestation of constraint and the assertion of a certain freedom of movement. Aesthetic freedom is linked to human agency, to the power to create the (multi-) cultural habitats in which we live.¹⁸

I am convinced that there is a dialectical relationship between art and memory politics (or more broadly between image production and memory production), as both spheres are not only interwoven but, more importantly, constitutive of one another.

Conflicts over who we are – as a public with its own historicity – cannot be resolved solely by art, but it is through artistic mediation that many ambivalences can be addressed, wounds opened, feelings hurt, competitive and conflicting narratives expressed, without necessarily destroying one another. Artists, as well as art curators and critics, have participated by means of solo and group interventions in public space, memorial and counter-memorial gestures. Operations in the art-space employ and engage registers so different from those of historical knowledge or moral codes, and can be ambivalent and ambiguous. They do not need to present or explain facts; rather, they introduce intensities, a potentially productive confusion both cognitive (we do not know what we are looking at) and emotional or moral (what we should feel about it).

An interesting contribution to the discussion of the role of images in shaping memory can be found in Barbie Zelizer’s reflection on the “subjunctive voice of images in public memory,” i.e. the conviction that images might mobilize the possibilities, reinterpretations, and uncertainties of past events.¹⁹ Zelizer rightly argues that there is more to images in memory than just their indicative or symbolic capacity. She pays attention to recurring visual tropes in formations of public memory, tropes which travel over temporalities and topographies, activating potential analogies in historical experience and between historical protagonists. It might be contended that the rule governing the function and dynamic of images in public memory is that of montage, i.e. that images act through contingency:

[their] meaning settles not at the image’s original point of display but over time in new contexts that are always altered, sometimes playful, and often contradictory. By playing to the contingent aspect of a depicted event or issue, the image’s capacity to speak for the past changes in its relation to the events it depicts. And when dealing with events of a tragic nature, contingency may be the best interpretive stance for which we can hope.²⁰

I have seen these tropes being renegotiated in Tali and Astahovska’s show. I have sensed the effort of the curators to grasp the contingencies and reformulate the analogies. What comes to us as memories or, better said, afterimages, the images of what was, is always inherently transitory and receding. Upon looking closer at the mutability of memories and the dynamics of their resurfacing, one realizes the complexities of the underlying struggles of various groups to maintain or resist troubled pasts and traumas which respond to hegemonic attempts at fixing memories – whether in stone monuments or immutable sequences of images and powerful narratives – and ask “how the past can be opened up and its debilitating legacies transformed”²¹ by creative tactics simultaneously disrupting and engaging. What role can an exhibition play in combating the erasure of past violence from current memory and framing current violence in order to make “sense” of it, to render it historical but also opposable? I found myself following the process of redefinition – feminist at its core – of “linear temporality in favor of lateral, contingent, nongenealogical forms of transmission that can also inform our thinking about memory and its conception of the past, the present, and the future.”²²

Today’s reality – convulsed, transformed, de-ranged, suffering and bereaved by pandemic, war, and destruction, the media spectacle of gore, the genocide unfolding before our very eyes, the helplessness in the face of death and terror – is an affective condition that has changed our sense of historicity, recall, and expectancy, and threatened any futurity of historical and political togetherness.

At the moment (or the three moments when each exhibition opened to its audience), the conspicuousness of one’s connection to one’s mnemonic collective or persistent social frames that would provide sufficient narratives of belonging has been shaken if not utterly damaged. It is not so much the repertoire of cultural forms that has proven inadequate, but rather the frameworks this repertoire depended upon. Unlike previously, mnemonic transformation unfolds rather quickly with the participation of and through social media, the creative (mostly visual) and communicational possibilities they offer.

Following Susan Buck-Morss, devoted deconstructionist of historical knowledge and imagination, I would like to refer Tali and Astahovska’s project to what the author of the now classic essay “Visual Studies and Global Imagination” called a “thin membrane of images.”²³ I am thinking of a membrane of images of war and violence, conflict and resistance, migration and homecoming. The art practices collected in the show proved to be committed to “stretching that membrane, providing depth of field, slowing the tempo of perception, and allowing images to expose a space of common political action.”²⁴ I would like to think of this exhibition as an “opportunity to engage in transformation of thought” (unlearning) and “the epistemological resiliency necessary to confront a present transformation in existing structures of knowledge.”²⁵ An art exhibition might have the capacity to generate meaning, not only to carry it. And this potential of “generation” can be a call and a demand to keep developing an ”exhibitionary complex,”²⁶ yet take it in completely new directions, with new sensibilities and audiences.