Curator’s introduction

How much solidarity and empathy do we have for the struggles and suffering of others? How have artists actively and consciously contributed to its creation? The continuity of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine has tested many people’s feelings of empathy and solidarity. Across Eastern Europe it has revived many unhealed wounds and unprocessed memories, but unfortunately it has also led to new resistances. Since 2022 new global conflicts have emerged from older struggles, most prominently the violent war in Gaza, that has polarized the world. This exhibition and its artworks address the creation of solidarity and understanding by bridging past and present contexts, by creating new geographical connections, by bringing different traumas and discomforts, and by looking for ways of healing that is inspired by the past.

In the history of our region difficult sides have often been neglected by telling comforting stories instead that stress positive narratives and quickly move to ways of overcoming challenges. The recent wars have shifted the ways of thinking about the past and understanding the weight of memory in history. They have turned visible how the normalization of violence in the present often has its roots in the unworked traumas of the past. The exhibition Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds brings together difficult, uncomfortable 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, 20th century warfare and histories of colonialism, the uneasy balances between modes of survival and collaboration and how the post-soviet work with the shadows of the past is specific. 

The exhibition includes works by artists from the three Baltic countries, Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands. The experiences the artists evoke are ones that are often forgotten or ignored, and excluded from written histories. Artists in the exhibition narrate those experiences through individual stories, through family histories and archives, while touching upon collective cultural memory. The exhibition calls for reflection on the relationships between difficult pasts and their impact and presence today by opening transnational dialogues, forging connections and foregrounding solidarities between the different difficult histories that are perceived as incompatible or competitive with each other. Our aim as curators has been to rethink how art can increase the connectedness of the world, how it can turn the perspectives of minorities easier to comprehend and with which to empathize. 

Ukrainian artists Lia Dostlieva and Andrij Dostliev use original photographs of a Wehrmacht soldier who documented occupied lands during his service in Eastern Europe during the Second World War with his camera. Their reworked series of graphic works bring to the fore a stark contrast between the photographs that show the war-torn lands and battlegrounds as muddy soil, and the calm scenes of tourist magnets in Western European capitals. The “Prussian blue” in the sky is a reference to the traces of the Zyklon-B gas that was used by the Nazis in gas chambers in extermination camps in some of the countries occupied by the Wehrmacht.

Several works open experiences of women that have been forgotten in history. For instance, Jaana Kokko addresses the neglected history of the Roma genocide. While researching the life story of the Finnish-Estonian playwright Hella Wuolijoki she interviews women in the border town of Valga/Valka, and turns motherhood into a connecting element for different generations of women from different communities. Zuzanna Herzberg’s work discusses the memory of forgotten Jewish Polish and Jewish Latvian women who joined the Spanish Civil War as volunteers. Although this war marked the start of an important phase of women’s political activism, women’s role in this struggle has been almost entirely forgotten in the course of patriarchal processes of commemoration and remembering. Eléonore de Montesquiou revives a lesbian love story from history by bringing into attention the forgotten novel 33 Monsters (1907) that was written by her great-grandaunt Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal. Invoking queer history in the region, her work opens a fascinating example for rethinking the often-neglected plurality of identities in the Baltic region as well as the role of class for emancipation. 

Many of the works focus on unlearning inherited histories with artists actively seeking to interpret them anew. How was the Baltic region part of colonial processes shaped by Western and Soviet imperial imaginaries and ambitions? What kind of consequences have these colonial politics had on individual lives and lives of entire communities? Quinsy Gario together with the artist collective Family Connection bring together the histories of Estonia, the Netherlands, Sudan and the Caribbean Island of Curaçao. As they research the pre-colonial depictions of people of colour, they find the figure of Saint Maurice who lived in the 3rd century, and who was later chosen as the patron saint of the Blackheads Brotherhood that was active in the Baltic countries until the 1940s. Tanel Rander turns to the subconscious mechanisms that have held him back from learning German as the language of colonizers. During his one year stay in Berlin he turned to the roots of this uneasiness to understand their personal and cultural origins. By combining facts and fiction, he researches the ways particular symbols carry with them colonial undertones.  

Like several other artists in the exhibition, Vika Eksta, too, works with her family history. Her work confronts the silence about the most brutal military conflict of the late Soviet era, the Soviet war in Afghanistan in which many people from different Soviet republics participated against their will. By engaging with the experience of her father Eksta shows the long-term influence that this war has left to her family due to its deliberate neglect. Tatari artist Yaniya Mikhalina goes back to the transgenerational memory encoded in her grandmother’s songs and clothes from hand-vowen fabrics and their hand-crafted ornaments. The songs called ‘munajats’ that simultaneously use different languages record histories of colonial violence inflicted upon the Tatari community and also embody ways of healing that the artists turn visible. Their transmission carried with them resistance in the circumstances in which both Islam and the Tatar language have been outlawed in the Volga-Ural region in the course of colonial politics. In Estonia Tatar history and cultural histories of other local Islamic communities remain largely unknown. 

Several works discuss the burdens and vulnerabilities that the continuity of the Soviet past brings on individuals and societies. In Paulina Pukytė’s work in the public space surrounding the Tallinn Art Hall Pavilion, she makes visible the shadows of the Soviet era persistent in and for the neighborhood. Embodying the metaphor of how the past haunts the present, these shadows are simultaneously a source of discomfort and uncertainty. 

The exhibition was previously shown at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga in 2020 and at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius in 2022. It forms a part of the project Communicating Difficult Pasts (2019-2024), which engages with the uncomfortable and often forgotten sides of history in the Baltic countries and its neighboring countries. With this project we have explored the entanglements of past and present and found new ways how visual art and creative research methods can open the long-term influences of the past, hence shaping and changing contemporary understandings of the past.