Unlearning Inherited Histories or Introducing Entangled Memories from the Baltics

ABSTRACT This exhibition review discusses the past exhibition Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds (2022) at the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania. The project tried to shed light on the shared impact that long-silenced traumas and counter-memories have on the Baltic region, especially from a transnational perspective. A special focus lies on the oscillations between individual memory and public history as the exhibition participants engage in the creation of so-called ‘artistic historiographies’ based on unexplored and unknown memories by minorities and women. The displayed artworks are experimentally trying to provoke a process of ‘unlearning inherited histories’ by developing multifocal viewpoints and interpretations, an ongoing process the text accompanies. Navigating through the exhibitions’ conceptual threads, artistic manifestations, and ways of storytelling, the review introduces a generation of artists that is bonded to difficult and therefore challenging historical events from the 20th century, from the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine to the Dąbroszczacy soldiers and autofictional lesbian literature.

century: firstly, a growing formation of 'communities of destiny' for which history becomes a resource of identity, secondly, a transition from political to moral patterns of coming to terms with the past, and, thirdly, a transformation of monological-national memory constructions into rather transnational and entangled entities (Radonić and Uhl 2016, 11;Assmann 2016, 39).
The exhibition curators Margaret Tali, Ieva Astahovska, and Eglė Mikalajūnė sit thematically exactly here because via Communicating Difficult Pasts they openly 'sought out transnational and transcultural connections and their entangled developments, proposing to approach the Baltic states [. . .] as a Baltic region of memory' (Tali and Astahovska 2021). Against this backdrop, Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds seems to be a very contemporary exhibition project that is not only aligning with the most important shifts in memory politics and memory studies, but it also gives an insight into artistic research practices that deal with the end of monological-national memory and try to create situated and entangled objects of cultural-historical knowledge. With its strong focus on the visualization of cultural traumas, silenced histories, unhealed wounds, and unprocessed memories from the twentieth century in the Baltic region, the exhibition tries to present a pluriversal and plurivocal array of artistic projects on unwritten and untold histories (as well as her stories) that still reverberate into the present.
As the exhibition and the whole project introduces an almost incomparable density of texts, materials, themes, references, and methods of artistic research, for this review I decided to create imaginary chapters that explain the exhibition's conceptual red threads: Haunting, Body memory, Transgenerational memory and trauma, Blind spots: history and present, Rediscovery of queer icons, and Unlearning and reimagining. To understand the main focuses of the exhibition project, it seemed to me that these headings do a great deal to help navigation through the artworks and their specific fields of research. One important factor is minoritarian experience and identity, 2 gluing together the writing of history and the activation of 'memories from below'. 3 Below these headings and thematic clusters, one can find artistic historiographies that are embedded in the Baltics (or in their proximity) and that often display the end of the monological-national memory and partially document the strong relations between memory politics and identity-building across the Baltic countries. These self-created headings by the author will help to guide through the works of the aforementioned exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius but they also demonstrate the new perspectives on historical memory -traceable not only in the visual arts but also in the research fields of cultural theory and memory studies.

Haunting
The first aspect that becomes present in the exhibition is haunting, being caught up by the past, which often affects us -usually against our will and in a somewhat magical way. Not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative realization. 4 A real and symbolic recurrence of unresolved and flitting issues is evident in the works of Paulina Pukytė, who has realized her sculptural interventions in Shadows (2022) in inconspicuous locations in the National Gallery of Art, the former Museum of the Revolution designed in 1968 and opened in 1980. The first work is a specially prepared faint dune made of black sand behind the entrance area, which continues to dissolve daily due to the visitors' steps. In addition to this very poetic dune, which -in view of the current war in Europe -makes one think of incendiary ash, Paulina Paukytė has placed Soviet crystal bowls in various places in and outside the white cube. These relics of a vanished era, which due to their opulence and widespread nature carry with them not least a colonial and aristocratic tinge, are objects of vernacular memory (Tali and Astahovska 2022;Pukyté 2020) and embodied knowledge. This is not least because these crystal bowls were widespread in Eastern Europe and were only slowly displaced and replaced in the course of the transformation and linked 'eurorenovation' (Ryabchuk 2013). Their subtle presence in rather unlikely; architecturally peripheral locations raise seemingly incidental old familiar questions concerning the sacral valorization of profane everyday objects as well as the accessibility or closedness of the institutional art sphere.

Body memory
One particularity that philosopher Laura U. Marks explains in relation to the social level of 'embodied experience' in intercultural cinema is that 'The body is a source not only of individual memory but of cultural memory.' The film Body Memory (2011) by animation artist Ülo Pikkov brings to mind the mass deportation of over 200,000 Balts, shipped in cattle cars to Siberia where they were forced to work under inhumane conditions. In Pikkov's animated film, the affected inmates are severely injured, de-individualized, and bandaged figures that increasingly lose form, flutter, and destructively dissolve into one another during their forced transportation. The bandages wrapped around the bodies, ultimately shaping the body, recalls concepts of bodily memory and, not least, Laura U. Mark's theorization of memories of smell, touch, and taste (Marks 2000). The occupants of the transports ultimately vanish after losing their textile bandages.
Interestingly, the curators pointed out that the continuous use of Western categories in art and cultural history has created a need for new frameworks and concepts to grapple with cultural memory outcomes from Eastern Europe. 5 The cultural theoretical topoi and frameworks from film, literature, history, trauma and memory studies that the project boldly connects with are: oral history, body memory, skin memory, transgenerational memory, postmemory, counter-memory, vernacular memory, microhistory, entanglements and intersections, among others. One must admit, however, that these concepts can neither be described as intrinsically art historical nor 'Eastern' (although one could possibly cartograph 'Eastern' traditions and genealogies for each of them which clearly was not a goal of the project and exhibition). Nevertheless, these affectual, corporeal, ethical-political, and implicit knowledge-oriented approaches do correspond very well with the artistic works and surely offer huge potential for the transcultural orientation of the project.

Transgenerational memory and trauma
Another central aspect of the exhibition is trauma and the transgenerational transfer of traumatic content within art: the postmemory (see also Roover 2020). The work I still feel sorry when Ithrow away food-Grandma used to tell me stories about the Holodomor (2018) was produced by Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev in their exile in Poland and it recalls the importance of food preparation and discarded food for people whose ancestors experienced one of the worst famines of our time. The work is a two-month visual diary documenting the food the artist duo failed to eat throughout the day and had to throw away as prints on paper (Dostlieva 2022;Dostlieva and Dostliev 2020). A particular feature is the persistent suppression of the memory of this traumatic event, which claimed 3.3 to 7.5 million lives, in Ukraine to this day. The devotion to the shape and forms of the leftovers in connection with affects such as shame and/or guilt and landscapes is described by curator Margaret Tali in the exhibition brochure as 'bodily memory and its possible geographical and mental locations' (Tali 2022, 32). Other works in this thematic field include Conversations with Dad (2020) by Vika Eksta, a biographical filmic investigation of her father's life journey, post-traumatic disorder, and addiction problems as a result of his forced military deployment in the Soviet-Afghan War (1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989). The artist and the curators point out that the psychological consequences of this war have never been dealt with on a societal level, although they affected not only the soldiers involved, but also their families. The emotional distance between father and daughter is staged cinematically, the living space of the father and his daily activities becomes the scene of the permanent failure and bumpy resumption of their conversation. The video work Roma Mountain (2020) by Jaana Kokko goes in search of traces of contemporary witnesses of Hella Wuolijoki (1886-1954), a Finnish-Estonian author, entrepreneur, and politician. During this field research, she comes across the extermination of the Roma community in Wuolijoki's home village most of whom were taken to the Klooga concentration camp during the Nazi occupation. It is these moments in the exhibition that make it clear how many open ends and untouched knots an in-depth exploration of Baltic history potentially holds.
A curiosity of the late Soviet phase is addressed by the video installation Coders (2022) by Anastasia Sosunova. It reflects the handling of mental conflicts in North eastern Europe. From today's point of view, the theme of the video installation can rather be assigned to the esoteric-spiritual complex, whereas so-called 'coding therapy' was considered a recognized and widespread healing method for the treatment of addictive diseases during late Soviet period. The Soviet art of healing in its authoritarianism obviously had much in common with ideological education and mediation because a popular phrase of healers was: 'I give the instruction. . .' This practice was based on dominant sentences that forbade contact with the tempting substance and became fashionable especially in the 1980s and is still practiced today. Sosunova mixes different levels: the first is the experiential level of a protagonist, the second consists of interviews, and the third is flaneuristic motives in places linked to coding. Sosunova deindividualizes the experience of coding by undertaking research trips, conducting hidden camera conversations, waiting in front of practice addresses, and thus looking at the phenomenon from a physical-sensory and materialistic point of view.

Blind spots: history and present
The installation Volunteers for Freedom  by Zuzanna Hertzberg deals with the unknown legacy of Jewish-Polish and Jewish-Latvian women who volunteered to fight in the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War (1936)(1937)(1938)(1939). At that time, 40000-59,000 volunteers agreed to go into battle at the call of the Communist International (Comintern). Although there were a large number of women who joined the Comintern, very little is known about the Eastern European fighters. The life stories of these voluntary Communist fighters, most of whom were selected leftist, Jewish, and anarchist women of Eastern European origin, are presented in excerpts through photographs, documents, and letters. Hertzberg's portrait boxes consist of archival materials as well as intensely colored and impastoed reverse paintings on wood that reflect the moods of these brief, unknown, touching, and often abruptly ended autobiographies. Her second work Nomadic Memory (2017) is a plaque that remembers the Dąbroszczacy, interwar Polish citizens who were members of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936)(1937)(1938)(1939). According to Hertzberg (2020), these soldiers 'fought for the freedom of Europe during its first confrontation with fascism, and then for the independence of Poland on many fronts.' The plaques that mark their battles for freedom were removed in the 1990s; through her performances and sculptures Hertzberg wants to reactivate the official memory on these 'disavowed soldiers' who have been erased from history (Hertzberg 2020).
A work that has a similar experimentalism and nonchalance as Paulina Pukyte and could be described as site-specific and anti-fascist artistic research is by Laima Kreivytė. Kreivytė has been an integral part of the Lithuanian art scene since the 2000s. Her performances, especially in the context of the queer-feminist collective Cooltūristės, are known nationwide and deal with cosmic fantasies, escapisms, and futurisms -always against the background of post-socialist social phenomena. For Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds, Kreivytė transferred part of a controversial sculpture into the exhibition space; she provided a displacement of a pipe that belonged to the public artwork The Embankment Arch (2009-2022) by Vladas Urbanavičius, which meant an aesthetic horror vacui (an artistic fear of leaving empty spaces) for many citizens of the city of Vilnius (Čiučelis 2014). For Kreivytė, the pipe in 2022 has another level of meaning: it recalls the flows of fossil fuels from east to west, flows of energy and capital that ultimately helped finance the Ukrainian war. In Kreivytė's opening performance 65 days (2022), she struck the symbolic pipe 65 times to create an acoustic symbol for each day since the start of Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine. In addition, two musicians played the baritone saxophone and the tuba while moving through the building from the uppermost floor, over the central staircase, to the second-floor balcony.
Kreivytė's second work Mortification. In Search of the Black Book (2022) is a search for the lost yet infamous black book or diary of the most important Lithuanian poet Salomėja Nėris . She was one of twenty delegates who traveled to Moscow asking for Lithuania to join the USSR. Moreover, she wrote a poem about Stalin which she read at the Kremlin. To this day it is unclear whether Salomėja was forced to do this or whether it was her free decision; the only clue is believed to be in her black book. In search for an answer, Kreivytė shows an installation consisting partly of works from the collection of the National Gallery of Art containing representations of Salomėja in various period paintings and sculptures.

Rediscovery of queer icons
A highlight of the exhibition is Eléonore de Montesquiou's work 33 Monsters (2022). The installation is based on the novel of the same name and the life story of Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal (1866-1907. The content of the novel, published in St. Petersburg in 1907, is based on autofictional, erotic diary entries written by the author to Vera, the author's lover. The basic idea of the novel is 33 picturesque nude portraits of Vera, made by 33 different male artists. Zinovieva-Annibal was one of the first authors to reflect lesbian desire in literature, a mother of seven, and an ancestor of de Montesquiou. Lydia's self-adopted family name, Annibal, is a reference to her having descended from Abram Petrovich Hannibal, a black man abducted as a child who later worked in service of Peter the Great. Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal's herstory is recalled by her descendant de Montesquiou -as an unrecognized, highly emancipatory author, queer-feminist pioneer, and bohemian 'femme fatale' whose literary practice was closely intertwined with her life Figure 1. The recuperation of queer icons is also a characteristic of the audio installation Mermaid (2022) by Matīss Gricmanis andOna Juciūtė. Kaspars Irbe (1906-1996) was a gay man whose lifestyle was forbidden during the interwar period, the Nazi period, and the Soviet occupation. He documented his nearly century-long experience in his diaries -altogether 61 notebooks -that he wrote from 1927 until the end of his life. With a personality that grew out of the bohemian underground of the 1920s, Irbe learned to live a double life during the Soviet period: one as a Soviet citizen together with his parents in a small fisherman's house in Jūrmala, and another with his gay and prostitute friends in Riga. 6 One of his circle's identity protection tactics was to give each other phantastic nicknames, for instance, Irbe called himself 'Cleopatra' or 'Mermaid Sea Rose' (vārava in Latvian) in letters to his friends (Lipša 2021, 435; see also Lipša 2022). It is a great achievement of the exhibition that it actively pursues and continues an erotohistoriography on queer personalities in the Soviet era. 7

Unlearning and reimagining
The most translocal and speculative work in the exhibition is by Quinsy Gario and Mina Ouaouirst, entitled We Offered Maurice Dates, Grasshoppers andWater Pt. 2 (2020-2022). The work is based on the life and travels of Saint Maurice from Meroë in Sudan who was the leader of the legendary Roman Theban Legion and was martyred in what is now Switzerland in the third century. The collaborative work contains a video work, a slideprojection, poetry, and a diptych of tapestries. Saint Maurice had unexpected and rather unknown relations with the Baltics: He was most probably represented on the coat of arms of Vytautas the Great and Saint Maurice once was the patron saint of the Brotherhood of Blackheads in Riga. One major anchor of the work's multilayered story leads back to the Dutch consul in Kaunas, Jan Zwartendijk, who saved Jews during World War II by issuing visas to Curaçao, an island in the Caribbean that was then a Dutch colony. 8 This highly detailed tale of the rather undocumented life of a black saint who left traces in the Baltics is the ending point of an exhibition that values all suppressed side-factors of 'monolithic memory:' imaginaries, myths, oral transmissions, secrets, losses, ghosts, monsters, surfaces, smells, touches, and tastes.
The hybrid, artistic and curatorial research-based character of the exhibition emphasizes the great need to retell the traumas and blurs of Baltic history from transnational, situated, and entangled perspectives. A distinctive feature of the project is the implicitunfortunately not explicit -methodical anchoring in the field of artistic research, which came to understand art as an epistemic, that is knowledge-generating practice and research discipline. Although the exhibition is strongly interlinked with academic research activities and infrastructures, such as organizing the international symposium Prisms of Silence (2020), editing the winter issue Confronting Muted Memories of the Baltic Worlds journal (2020), and the special issue The Return of Suppressed Memories in Eastern Europe: Locality and Unsilencing Difficult Histories of the Memory Studies journal (2022), its processual and research-based artworks on display are not declared as cultural productions of historical knowledge, as objects of artistic historiography. Moreover, one can find almost no references to these discursive events and publications in the exhibition brochure Figure 2. The same modesty can be observed in the reflection of the curatorial role and agency: by constantly creating visibility for, and reflection of, these 'artists as historians' (Godfrey 2007) and their situated and entangled artistic historiographies, the curatorial work clearly goes beyond the conception and production of two site-specific exhibitions in Riga and Vilnius. Through co-creating these new objects and frameworks of knowledge, the curators also directly engage in a strengthening of the role of art in the renegotiation of (universal, national, selective, and linear) images of history. Their project is a valuable contribution to a decolonial post-socialist exhibition history in the Baltics but also represents an equally precious contribution to European memory studies and alter-globalist art history. Despite the historically sensitive, impressive post-modern exhibition design by Jonas Žukauskas, there might have been a few visitors who struggled to apply and follow the grand curatorial narrative of 'difficult pasts,' meaning that they eventually could not see beyond the radius of an individual work of art and to independently make meaningful connections, crossreferences, and comparisons with other works in the space. Consequently, this visionary, collective, and research-based curatorial work could have been emphasized and highlighted more -both for the exhibition's daily visitors as well as for its professional audience, for instance, through the creation of various thematic chapters that also structure the exhibition's choreography Figure 3. The project and exhibition are relevant for a wider local and international audience that is interested in post-socialist, transcultural, and decolonial art and history writing and the aforementioned topics (Haunting, Body memory, Transgenerational memory and trauma, Blind spots: history and present, Rediscovery of queer icons, etc.). In my understanding, the exhibitions' multidirectional approach and presumably intentional vastness of painful histories from Eastern European countries mirrors the current status quo: That these histories are only now coming to the surface due to subjective artistic investigations more than 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Baltic countries' independence. 9 At this moment in time, it feels as if the exhibition's thematic breadth is so wide because these oftentimes violent histories are still missing historiographical leveling, smoothing and/or classification. Due to the often confrontational and disturbing nature of these histories, the exhibition provokes unsettling 'processes of rewinding' (Azoulay 2019, 56), leading to calls and claims for transformation and reparations for imperial violence. 10 It is the exhibition's great achievement that it allows us to look into the 'unmarked center' of official history writing (Meskimmon 2022, 34), to unveil the difficult and 'indefinitive' (Azoulay 2019, 10) pasts' complexities, and last but not least that it enables visitors to purposefully (re)connect with them.  Assmann (2016, 32) writes: 'History becomes an identity resource of the first order.'. 3. For 'memories from below' in the GDR context, see: Husse and Rosenfeld (2019). 4. 'Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition' (Gordon 2008, 8). 5. The curators write: 'Baltic history, with its different colonial occupations and military conflicts, is so complex that it is often difficult to make sense of it to outsiders without simplifying it significantly. We have continued to use Western categories in art and cultural history to describe it, when in fact, new frameworks and concepts are necessary to articulate it for both ourselves and others' (Tali and Astahovska 2021). 6. The artists write: 'The Soviet period forged a growing schism between his self and the persona of a Soviet citizen, and he witnessed everything that the brutal and bloody 20 th century brought upon the region' (Gricmanis and Juciūtė 2022, 23). 7. For more information on eroto-historiography, see chapter 3 in Freeman (2010, 95-136). 8. Other key points are clashes between the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the Duchy of Courland over Tobago in the seventeenth century as well as the singing in Tamazight, one of the oldest existing languages (Fritzsch 2023). 9. In the sense of Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory, the exhibition exemplifies how 'the specters of one traumatic history often resonate with other traumatic histories, whether or not those histories are connected to each other by empirical historical links' (Rothberg and Lambert 2021). 10. In her monograph Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums, curator Margaret Tali (2018, 3) rightly points out that '"difficult knowledge" is confrontational; it urges the viewer to face sides of history he or she [or they, the author] might not want to acknowledge and ones that are disturbing rather than pleasant.'.