CBEES Advanced Seminar “Museum Histories and the Decolonial Gaze: Towards Conceptualizing Colonialism in 19th and 20th Century Estonian History” with Margaret Tali, Postdoctoral Fellow at Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Tallinn, Estonia

Speaker: Margaret Tali, Postdoctoral Fellow at Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Tallinn, Estonia

Discussant: Maria Silina, Adjunct Professor at the Department of History of Art, UQAM, Montreal, and a Visiting Researcher at Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES)

Chair: Lelde Luik, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University

Abstract: In this talk I will bring the meanings of coloniality in Estonian context together with histories of local museums. In this context during the 19th and 20th centuries colonialisms involved Western colonialisms and Russian/Soviet imperialisms. I will discuss how these colonial relations have been conceptualized in discourses of history writing, how these particular colonial relations have shaped museums in the course of 20th century and focus on two examples of musealized private collections – Johannes Mikkel collection at the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn and the collection of Dimitri and Ivan Solomentsev in the Estonian National Museum in Tartu. The first was gathered by Johannes Mikkel as a manager of the state-owned antique shop in Tallinn throughout the soviet era, whereas the second was collected by the Solomentsev’ brothers from Congo in the 1920s during their service as medics as a part of the French and Belgian colonial regimes. Although the stories of these collections are very different they make clear the necessity of rethinking and rewriting local colonial histories as global and entangled.

Margaret Tali is Postdoctoral Fellow at Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History and Visual Culture. Her research interests involve museology, 20th century Baltic art history, art and migration, as well as questions around curating difficult heritage. She has gained a PhD in the University of Amsterdam at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Tali is the author of “Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums” (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor of the Special Issue “The Return of Suppressed Memories in Eastern Europe: Locality and unsilencing difficult histories” in Memory Studies journal (3:15, 2022). Together with Ieva Astahovska she has initiated the collaborative research and exchange project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” (2019–2024) that focuses on the 20th century history and memory of the Baltic region.