Symposium Power Relations and Historical Turning Points in the Baltic Sea Region: Critical Vocabularies for Understanding Art, Material Culture and Environment

This symposium aims to revisit the vocabularies for art and craft based material culture, environment, their relationships and hierarchies in the Baltic Sea region, by bringing together scholars in humanities, social sciences, and heritage practitioners. We will look at a longer time span in order to contribute critical articulations for the study of the region, and to bring attention to the hierarchies of power and influence in the region. Even though in recent years, research on shared histories and egalitarian approaches have started to grow taking interest in cultural exchanges, we want to put the spotlight on the inequalities across the region on the national, transnational and regional levels, to examine residues of old power structures, such as Swedish conquests in its age of ‘greatness’ in the 17th and early 18th centuries, the Russian dominance in the region in the 19th century, the experiences of the world wars and the Cold War in the 20th century.

The symposium aims to examine how the relationships between forms of overseas colonial power and domination have affected the dynamics around the Baltic Sea, and the relative positions of various ethnic groups, including minorities and indigenous peoples, as well as the influence of such forms of administration and control on approaching the environment. What kind of language do we need to articulate and speak about such forms of influence and geographical interrelations? What could we gain from dialogues between different disciplines and perspectives of heritage practitioners? How does the natural environment and the ways of interacting with it affect understanding material culture and vice versa? What kinds of roles have art and visual culture carried in maintaining and resisting the hierarchies?

Register: Camilla.larsson@sh.se

PROGRAM

DAY 1 • 28.04.2025 • MONDAY

Location: Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels allé 7 Flemingsberg, room MC213.

9:00–9:30 Welcome and introduction

Session 1: Exhibitions as means of contact and friction

9:30–11:00 Moderator: TBA

Kristian Handberg & Joel Odebrant: Exhibiting “the Baltic” during the Long 1989

Kristoffer Arvidsson: Exchange: Difference and Mirroring: Exhibitions of Art from the Baltic Region at the Gothenburg Museum of Art in the Post-War Period

Linara Dovydaitytė: Dissonant heritage in Baltic museums: beyond representations

11:00–11:30 Coffee break

Session 2: The marginalised and the silenced in the post-Cold War contexts

11:30–13:00 Moderator: TBA

Agne Bagdziunaite: Imaginary Archive – Power, Memory, and Gendered Histories in the Baltic Sea Region

Indrė Urbelytė: Building Socialist Realism. Works of Soviet Artists in the State Art Collections of Occupied Lithuania

Nicola Foster: Art and the Politics of Independence: Beware of Exiting Your Dreams (2001)

13:00–14:00 Lunch Break

Session 3: Exhibitions and urban preservation as mediators of dissonant heritage

14:00–15:30 Moderator: Jörg Hackmann

Irina Seits: To heal or to hide? Reuses of histories and material legacy of inconvenient pasts: the case of the Noblessner district in Tallinn

Feliks Gornischeff: Exhibiting early 19th century ethnographic objects from the Pacific: the example of Estonian Maritime Museum’s exhibition ’Famous Sea Voyages: The Broadening Horizons of Europeans’

Mia Åkefeldt: Negotiating Finnishness through prefabricated houses. Trade and exhibitions of Finnish prefabricated wooden houses in the Baltic Sea region between 1880 and 1960

DAY 2 • 29.04.2025 • TUESDAY

Location: Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels allé 7 Flemingsberg, room MC213.

Session 4: Making archives speak, challenging hegemonic narratives

10:00–11:30 Moderator: TBA

Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson: Colonialism, assimilation and the construction of the nationstate to Swedish minority groups/minority languages

Agnieška Avin Ileri: The (Dis)Power of Absence: Roma Marginalization in Lithuanian State Archives and Memory Institutions

Quinsy Gario: Communicating Black Pasts, Presents and Futures

11:30–12:00 Coffee break

Session 5: Past and current narratives on nature and organic matter in de-colonial practices

12:00-13:30 Moderator TBA

Margaret Tali: The Baltic Oak as a Symbol and the Material Histories of Baltic Colonialism

Martyna Šulskutė: Wetland restoration in Lithuania as post-colonial practice

Mairita Folkmane, Aiga Dzalbe & Ilva Skulte: Soil, clay and discourse: how the place of ceramics is re-interpreted in Rothko Museum in Latgale

13:30–14:30 Lunch Break

Session 6: Art and exhibitions crafting vocabularies for the environment and socio-political memory

12:00-13:30 Moderator TBA

Ieva Astahovska: The Baltic Sea and the Concept of the Politics of Location in Contemporary Art

Camilla Larsson: Building Bridges, Sowing Seeds in the Baltic Sea Region in Times of Transformation. The Organic Art of Władysław Hasior and Magdalena Abakanowicz in Sweden during the 1970s

Astrid von Rosen: Sea of Memories: Scenographic Vocabularies for Baltic Sea Heritage

13:30–14:00 Coffee break

14:00-14:30 Final discussion and conclusions