Konferences PROGRAMMA  pieejama šeit: CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Klausītāju reģistrācijas veidlapa

PANEĻREFERĀTS
Trešdien, 9. aprīlī plkst.  10.15-11.05 JVLMA Ērģeļu zālē

Dorota Kołodziejczyk
Institute of English Studies
University of Wrocław (Poland)

JOYS AND FEARS: POSTCOLONIAL AFFECT IN POSTCOMMUNIST ENVIRONMENTS

The breakthrough of 1989 bringing the Round Table talks in Poland to the dissolution of the communist regime and the subsequent system changes in the Soviet bloc came as a shock, which was less about a surprise how it transpired as a sheer probability, and more about the abruptness of change that followed, its transversality touching all spheres of public and private lives. This shock generated a range of discourses whose task was to kindle joys and hopes connected with the brave new world of freedom, democracy and capitalism opening, and to abate the pains and disappointments brought about by the new system and its harsh requirements, more often than not communicated in the field of economy and politics as the region’s inferiority and inadequacy to European/western norms. 
In my talk, I will focus on the collapsed environments of the postcommunist social, cultural and natural landscape and the literary and artistic ways to cope with the collapse by responding to, unraveling, revising, transforming, recycling and challenging its impact. The ways of coping creatively with the crisis of collapse and breakthrough and their long-term consequences contribute one of the most interesting cases of postcolonial affectivity – the unique mixing of hopes and resentment, of joys and fears, going multidirectionally across the agonistic space of postcommunist debris environments. 
 

Dorota Kołodziejczyk is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She is Chair of Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Centre. Academic Research Centre, director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre and board member of the Postdependence Studies Centre, an inter-university research network. She has published on postcolonialism, comparative literature, translation studies and disability. Her recent publications include  East Central Europe Between the Colonial and Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century (co-edited with Siegfried Huigen), OA, Palgrave 2023; guest-editing of the European Review (with Siegfried Huigen): Cultural Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe After WW2 and the Collapse of Communism (2022) The Landscape of Hate: Olga Tokarczuk in Populist Discourse in Poland, and New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages (2021); “Through the Iron Curtain: The Geopolitics of Writing (with Mirja Lecke), in: The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature (2020); Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge 2016, 2018), (co-edited with Cristina Sandru), and numerous articles. Board member of the Palgrave Macmillan “New Comparisons in World Literature.” 

 

PANEĻREFERĀTS

Ceturtdien, 10. aprīlī plkst. 11.00 - 11.50 JVLMA Ērģeļu zālē

Benedikts Kalnačs 

Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia (Latvia)

POSTCOLONIAL BIOGRAPHIES: EMOTION, MEMORY AND REPRESENTATION 

This keynote aims contextualize the post-colonial and post-Soviet experience of Latvian society from the perspective of Postcolonial Studies and Memory Studies. In my investigation, I trace the gradual transformation of the initial emotionally charged response to the end of the colonial period (in the early 1990s) into more reflexive approach. At the same time, the focus on traumatic personal experience remains intact even if representational strategies change. In this process, the mobilization and interplay of individual and collective memories play a crucial role. The maintenance of cultural memory is achieved through biographical and autobiographical narratives that preserve the personal dimension while at the same time opening a possibility for more inclusive approaches. The variety of biographical contexts indicates the interpretative potential of multidirectional memory, as well as, regarding meta-histories, touches on the concept of post-memory. The case studies I explore are interdisciplinary, with the focus on autobiographical narratives by film and theatre scholar Valentīna Freimane and writer and poet Māra Zālīte, as well as on a motion picture featuring the fate of actress Marija Leiko. The story of Freimane has also been captured in a contemporary opera “Valentīna” by the composer Arturs Maskats. Covering a century from the 1920s on, these different narratives are in my paper put into the context of decolonization of Latvian society on its way toward more inclusive approach going beyond the limits of a conservative view of national identity. Related issues indicate potential synergies between Postcolonial Studies and Post-Communist Studies as well as point to the continuing importance of the remembering of the Holocaust in literature and art. By looking at various strategies of representation in the works under discussion, I explore four interrelated dimensions of human relations: to institutions and to the social order, to oneself as a social being, to other individuals, and to the natural and cultural environment, also beyond a local setting.  

Benedikts Kalnačs is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia, Riga. He is a member of the publications committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (CHLEL) series of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA). Principal research areas are 19th and 20th century Latvian literature, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies. Publications include: The Politics of Literary History: Literary Historiography in Russia, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Finland after 1990 (ed., with Liisa Steinby, Mikhail Oshukov, and Viola Parente-Čapková, 2024, Palgrave Macmilllan) and A New History of Latvian Literature: The Long Nineteenth Century (ed., with Pauls Daija, 2022, Peter Lang).

 

9 APRIL, WEDNESDAY

SESSION 1   Contextualization of the (post) colonial ties 

Ieva Astahovska
Art Academy of Latvia

Mapping the Decolonial in Latvian Art

The paper will focus on the impact of postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on art and art historical processes in Latvia and in our region. I will consider these perspectives as analytical rather than historical or geographical categories, aimed at resisting the legacy of hegemonic powers and their discourses, and building new models of thought and action. Although post- and decolonial discourses were previously underrepresented in the art and art history of the region, recent events, in particular the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have brought them to the forefront of the debate. In this presentation, I will also examine a set of concepts that essentially form the conceptual framework of post- and decolonial perspectives, both describing the changes in our society that have largely determined both its social and political course and its cultural context, and commenting on the relationship between local, regional and international contexts, and helping to reveal the interconnectedness of these contexts. 
In this presentation I will comment on how these perspectives challenge existing knowledge and create new or alternative perspectives on art and its heritage in the region. This includes addressing theoretical issues related to the complex political-historical and artistic contexts of the Baltics, as well as the responsibility to avoid simplification and taking local specificities into account, and the need for a new reflexive turn in the art history of the region. An essential aspect of these perspectives is the confrontation with the entrenched and hegemonic model of centre and periphery, which gives the discussion of horizontal art history and its possible methods an essential political significance.

Ieva Astahovska is an art scholar and curator. She is a lecturer art the Art Academy of Latvia, and holds a position at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, where she leads research projects concerning art and culture in the socialist and postsocialist period, as well as the entanglements between postsocialist and postcolonial perspectives in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. She is also involved in non-formal education projects, focusing on the current developments in contemporary art. Astahovska has curated several exhibitions, including "Difficult PastS. Connected Worlds" in Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn (2022–2024, co-curated with Margaret Tali), "Ecosystems of Change" (2021), and "Decolonial Ecologies" (2022–2023) in Riga. She has also edited numerous research-based publications.
 

Dina Lentsner
Capital University, Columbus, Ohio (USA)
Iryna Tukova
National Music Academy of Ukraine

Branding National Identity through Ukrainian Art Music of the Wartime

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine, there has been a systematic effort on the part of the US and EU to provide Ukrainians with the means to sustain themselves during the conflict and maintain an effective resistance to the attacker. But, seemingly, there is no keen awareness in the West of the ongoing cultural warfare that has been running parallel to the frontlines, extending beyond the borders, and perpetuating Russia's imperialist narrative of the supremacy of Russian art. For example, in their 2024-25 concert season, the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras all feature Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6, with Chicago and San Francisco Symphonies programming Tchaikosky’s other symphonic works. As Gienow-Hecht (2018) posits, “music constitutes itself an instrument or a forum designed to perpetuate impression, identity, or hegemony but also resistance and protest” (261).  
Taking into consideration the prominence of Russian art music in the global cultural scene, this paper argues for the urgent need to conceptualize and implement the Ukrainian art music brand that would negotiate Ukraine’s  Russian colonialism-framed past while embracing its politically and culturally independent future. Specifically, we consider Oleg Bezborodko’s Symphony No. 2, The Unbroken (2024) as a possible model for such a brand. 
In Bezborodko’s five-movement composition, Ukrainian music iconicism is represented by quotations from Mykola Lysenko’s and Borys Liatoshynsky’s works, and through globally celebrated Ukrainian anthem, “Oy, u luzi chervona kalyna.” These clearly nationalist musical-cultural markers are negotiated against references to the selected Russian vernacular and urban songs, as well as an allusion to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. The tension between opposing symbolic systems not only signifies the act of defiance, crucially important for the Ukrainian audience, but also exposes the global listener to a powerful, potent, politically charged Ukrainian brand of the musical experience.

Dina Lentsner, Ph.D. is a Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Capital University Conservatory of Music (Columbus, Ohio, USA). Lentsner’s research, focused on multidisciplinary analysis and interpretation of contemporary music with text bridges her two passions - literature and music - together. Her academic writing, examining music of Hungarian composer György Kurtág, American composer George Crumb (with literary scholar Stephanie Saunders), Estonian composer Lepo Sumera (with musicologist Saale Konsap), and Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds have been published in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Hungary, Lithuania, Georgia, and Ukraine. Lentsner’s travel-companion book, The Northern Kind of Loneliness: Musical Travelogues of Ēriks Ešenvalds, was supported by Latviešu Fonds (USA) and published by Musica Baltica (Riga, Latvia: 2023). Lentsner considers her most recent collaborative research, with Ukrainian musicologist Iryna Tukova and American media and communication scholar Sergey Rybas, the act of solidarity with the Ukrainian people in their fight for freedom.

Iryna Tukova, Ph.D., Dr. Habil., is an Associate Professor of Music Theory at the National Music Academy of Ukraine (Kyiv), a co-founder of NGO Liatoshynsky Foundation. Currently, she is holding a position of non-residential scholar at University of Toronto (Canada). In 2023–24, Dr. Tukova held a position of non-resident scholar at Indiana University Bloomington (USA). Her research interests include the history of Ukrainian contemporary art music, Borys Liatoshynsky’s œvre, and the intersection of natural science and art music. Dr. Tukova is the author of fifty articles, as well as the 2021 monograph. In 2024, she received the Ukrainian State Lysenko Award for the achievements in musicology. Dr. Tukova has presented her research at the musicological conferences in Ukraine, Germany, Lithuania, Austria, France, Poland, USA and Georgia, and lectured on contemporary Ukrainian art music at Ljubljana Academy of Music (Slovenia), Indiana University Bloomington (USA), and Capital University (Columbus, Ohio, USA).

Elīna Reitere
University of Latvia

The Latvian film industry's dependence on the shifting centre. A historical perspective

The Latvian animated film “Flow” (2024) by Gints Zilbalodis is a very special case within the framework of cultural colonialism in the film industry. Usually, foreign film projects that come to Latvia to shoot a film can be considered a typical colonial venture, because they use local talent without giving them the rights to the final product. [ Reitere, 2023] But the producers of “Flow” overturned the system by keeping all the artistic decisions on the Latvian side and delegating the drawing of the film to French animators. 
In 1986, during the groundbreaking 5th Congress of the Union of Filmmakers of the Soviet Union in Moscow, one of the most important demands in the speeches of the congress delegates was the demand for the decentralisation of the Soviet film production system. One of the most impressive speeches at the congress was delivered by the acclaimed Latvian film director Jānis Streičs (b. 1938). He called for creative freedom to be granted to the Soviet republics, pointing out the inefficiency of the centralised film distribution system and the fact that all decisions concerning the production and distribution of films are made at the centre, without any understanding of the real needs and specificities of the local republics. [Balčus, 2011]. 
The aim of this paper is to put the dependence of the Latvian film industry on the centre (either in the East or in the West) into a historical perspective, thus expanding and adapting the theses of Annus Epp, who speaks of a two-layered colonialism, because Latvians and Estonians had to deal with two colonial powers - that of the Baltic German nobility and that of the Russians. In the case of the Latvian film industry, which is small and peripheral, dependence has had several historical stages.

Elīna Reitere, PhD, is a researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art at the University of Latvia (State Research Programme "Navigating the Latvian History of the 20th-21st Century. Social Morphogenesis, Legacies and Challenges") and deputy editor-in-chief of the Latvian film magazine kinoraksti.lv. She studied audiovisual culture, film, media and performance studies in Riga and Mainz (Germany). She wrote her dissertation (published in 2018) on narration in slow cinema. Reitere is currently developing a book project on the social history of Latvian film since 1990. She has also written more than 110 theoretically dense film reviews and analyses of the film industry and interviewed art and film theorists such as Claire Bishop, Bela Tarr, Epp Annus, etc. for Kino Raksti.

SESSION 2   Performing arts and social interaction

Zuzana Timčíková
Institute of Theatre and Film Resarch of Art Research Centre Slovak Academy of Sciences (Slovakia)

New face of Slovak theatre after 1989: the development of independent theatres outside the capital

The shape of the current theatre network in Slovakia and its division into established and non-established theatres is the result of the long-term transformation processes that have taken place in the cultural sphere since the early 1990s. The founders, financing, legislative framework have changed, new independent theatres and cultural centres have been established, and the field of theatres' activities towards society has expanded. The transformation has also significantly affected the artistic functioning of theatres and their communication with audiences. The paper deals with the analysis of the key moments of the development of independent theatre culture in Slovakia after 1989. In particular, it notes the expanding network of independent theatres outside the country's capital and names the role of independent theatres outside the centre.

Zuzana Timčíková is a researcher at the Institute of Theatre and Film Studies at Slovak Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on independent theatres, educational activities in the theatre, audience development and audience research. In addition to her scientific work, she writes theare reviews, acts as an evaluator in various grant schemes for theatre production, coordinates the Monitoring of Theatres in Slovakia project, which maps theatre production in Slovakia, and is a former member of the dramaturgical board of the theatre festival "Touches and Connections" (Dotyky a spojenia).

Maia Sigua
Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire (Georgia)

Who were they singing for? The socio-political aspect of 'charity singles' in late Soviet and post-Soviet Georgia

Charity singles, originated back in 1970s, were the reactions on crisis. "In times of war, famine and global disasters, singers and musicians have come together to make music and raise money with far-reaching, world-changing results"(White, 2024). 
As a Western phenomenon, such songs had little or no existence in the Soviet Union until April 1989, when prominent representatives of all generations of the Soviet Georgian "Estrada" came together to sing about the tragic losses of 9 April and the hopes for unity and freedom during the first steps towards independence. “Vachukot ertmanets Titebi” (Let's give tulips to each other) by Jemal Sepiashvili and Moris Potskhishvili had some resemblance to Soviet mass songs, but on the other hand was clearly associated with the songs like "We are the world" by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. Despite the relatively "harmless" lyrics, it was a demonstrative gesture of turning away from Soviet Union and embracing something Western as a symbol of freedom. 
Based on the genesis of charity single, the paper highlights it’s typical musical, content and contextual characteristics and makes a comparative analysis of their Georgian counterparts through the course of changing meanings, messages and political and social agendas.

Maia Sigua is Associate Professor in the Music History Department and the head of Research Coordination Department at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire. Her recent research interests include 20th century musical theatre, ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary opera, opera and politics, repertoire politics, and issues of reception in totalitarian regimes. In addition to teaching and research, she gives public lectures in Georgia and abroad, contributes to blogs, magazines and other media, and writes program notes for the Tbilisi State Opera. In 2018 and 2022, she was awarded a DAAD-Rustaveli scholarship to carry out her post-doctoral research at Goethe University Frankfurt and Humboldt University of Berlin.

Teona Rukhadze
Associate professor at the Giorgi Mtatsmindeli University of Chant (Georgia)

Transformation of Traditional Music: The Ensemble "Mtiebi" and the Performance of Traditional Music in Post-Soviet Georgia

In the late Soviet period of the 1980s in Georgia, when public participation in religious rituals was still relatively rare, groups of young people began to appear in Georgian villages during Christmas and Easter. Following old traditions, they went from door to door singing and wishing people a happy holiday. This initiative was led by the ensemble "Mtiebi" under the direction of ethnomusicologist Edisher Garaqanidze. His goal was not only to revive this tradition, but also to introduce a new approach to the principles of performance, creating a contrast to the style of folk music prevalent during the Soviet period. During this period, "Mtiebi" and other ensembles inspired by its example were driven by the desire to revive long-suppressed genres, forgotten traditions, and authentic forms of musical performance. This trend continued into the 1990s and 2000s, although the landscape has begun to change in recent years. The presentation will discuss the reasons why some folk music performers now believe that certain elements of the Soviet-era performance style add a sense of refinement and presentability to traditional music. Conversely, some ethnomusicologists argue the opposite. Often, scholarly debates focus on what constitutes "good" versus "bad" or "right" versus "wrong" in the performance of traditional music. The goal of this presentation is to analyze current trends in folk music in post-Soviet Georgia using the ensemble "Mtiebi" as an example, and to evaluate the evolving discourse on traditional music performance in light of Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to folklore.

Teona Rukhadze is an ethnomusicologist, doctor of arts. She studied at the Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatory at the Faculty of Composition and Musicology, specializing in Ethnomusicology. In 2014 she defended her doctoral thesis on "Georgian Wedding Music - Issues of Style and Genre". She is an associate professor at the Giorgi Mtatsmindeli University of Chant, the coordinator of the International Relations Department at the A. Erkomaishvili State Folklore Center, a specialist at the Laboratory of Ethnomusicology at the Tbilisi State Conservatory, and a co-founder of the NGO "Folklife Georgia". She has participated in national and international scientific conferences, various field expeditions, research and educational projects. Fields of scientific interest are Georgian traditional wedding music, traditional music performance, politics and music.

Valeria Korablyova
Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic)

Musical Diplomacy of Wartime Ukraine: Escaping the Double Subaltern Position

The research develops a conceptual framework at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and postcolonial studies to expose how Ukrainian musicians and activists use musical means to increase their visibility on a global level and to raise their country's geocultural status on the mental maps of international audiences. From the European opera scene to the Eurovision Song Contest, Ukrainians deploy their soft power to manifest their country’s agency and garner international support (Ruble 2023; Sonevytsky 2019). By co-imagining future-oriented sovereign imaginaries in unison and making them audible (Sonevytsky 2019), people turn into sovereign citizens and create affective ties among themselves and with others across national borders who sympathize with their struggle. Scaling up the task from domestic to international recognition, Ukrainians manifest their agency (Esin 2017) globally, engaging with audiences through sound and musical means. These two sides of embodied and listened-to experiences form the complex process of becoming and belonging vis-a-vis a stronger adversary. Subalterns, usually denied rationality and an entry into the "republic of letters", have permitted access to their bodily experiences and acoustic expressions, often animalized or folklorised. However, using these very tools for reclaiming subjectivity and hegemony turns out an efficient – even if subversive – strategy.

Valeria Korablyova is Assistant Professor at the Department of Russian and East European Studies and the Leader of the Research Centre “Ukraine in a Changing Europe” at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University, Prague. Her expertise covers post-Soviet transformations in Ukraine and the region, with the research focus on mass protests, performative politics, and entangled imperial/colonial legacies. Dr Korablyova is a co-PI with Dr Louisa Martin-Chevalier in the CNRS-UK TANDEM project “A Subaltern That Sings: From Sound Resistance To Musical Diplomacy in Wartime Ukraine”. Her most recent publications include: ‘Why Is Ukraine Important? Challenging the colonial and Cold War Legacies in European social sciences’ in Soziologie (# 3, 2023); “Russia VS. Ukraine: A Subaltern Empire Against The “Populism of Hope” in AUC – Studia Territorialia (# 2 2022), and editing the special Topos issue “Transformations of Society and Academia in the Wake of the Russian War in Ukraine: Urgent Notes” (#2 2022).

SESSION 3      Postcolonial trajectories in Latvian art and environment

Jānis Kudiņš
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music (Latvia)

The Postcolonial Situation and the Reassessment of Past Discourses in Latvian Classical Music History

The last thirty years have reflected a gradual decolonization process in the research of Latvian classical music from various past periods. The specific ideological accents, defaults and exaggerations imposed by the totalitarian regime during the Soviet occupation have already been objectively analyzed and explained in the continuation of the process of writing music history. However, Russia’s war in Ukraine has encouraged more attention to the fact that, due to inertia, several years after the restoration of the country's independence, echoes of the Soviet occupation period discourses are still heard in explaining the history of Latvian music. Exaggerated statements of some aspects of Russian music's cultural impact in the past, factually and hermeneutically one-sided or objectively incomplete analysis of the unique local aspects of the musical heritage created in the past are reflected in certain notifications still circulated publicly. However, the reasons for this problem in Latvian music historiography are much deeper, and getting to know them makes one look more carefully at the complex postcolonial situation in the local music culture.
When the Republic of Latvia was founded in 1918 after about two centuries of tsarist Russian colonial rule, a strong wave of cultural nationalism flourished. That tried to emphasize the importance and uniqueness of the ethnic Latvian society and, for instance, cultivated a tendency to default on the Baltic German cultural heritage and its significance. In the second, long period of the Soviet occupation after the Second World War (1944–1990/1991), following the official discourse, this default was continued with new accents of the imperial Russification policy of the totalitarian regime. As a result, after the Soviet occupation, Latvian music culture had got to a situation, that discursively echoes various colonial and postcolonial experiences from the past. The report will analyze some examples of this situation. Hopefully, that will fruitfully stimulate the comparison of postcolonial situations between different countries.

Jānis Kudiņš, PhD, is a graduate of the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music (in 1997, a Bachelor’s degree, in 1999, a Master’s degree). In 2008, he defended his doctoral work in musicology. He has been a lecturer at the JVLAM since 1996 (a Professor since 2017). He also works as a Researcher at the Center for Scientific Research. His interests in musicology include several issues. These issues include Latvian and Baltic music history in the 19th–20th century; the concepts of Style, Modernism and Post-Modernism in music and art; methodology of scientific research; European popular music culture from the first half of the 20th century. He is the author of several scientific publications (including two monographs) in Latvian and English. He also actively participates in various international seminars and conferences in Latvia and other countries.

Inga Pērkone
Latvian Academy of Culture (Latvia)

Possibilities of Decolonization: Historiography of the Latvian Cinema

In my paper, I will give an overview of the periods and phenomena that could be associated with colonization in the history of Latvian cinema. I`d like to describe the "center" and "periphery" of filmmaking, the relationship between institutions and individuals within the framework of colonial systems. 
The postcolonial or rather decolonising approach encourages us to ask various questions about the past and present of Latvian films. I will focus on three of them in detail in my paper. First of all, the periodization of the Latvian cinema. In world film history it is traditionally accepted that the history of national cinema starts with the beginning of film production in an independent country, but in Latvia's situation, other solutions are also possible – either by expanding the view of what we can perceive as national cinema, or by radically narrowing the criteria. 
The second question is related to the historical possibility of obtaining academic or professional film education at a higher level - in many parts of the world such an opportunity arose after World War II. In fact, an opportunity also was for the Latvian people – but only in Russian and in the "center" – in Moscow or Leningrad. Latvian own film education system was started only after the country regained its independence. (The PhD student Kristaps Opincāns will tell in more detail in his paper Early Conceptual Approaches of Film Education in Latvia.) 
The third question is about terminology. During the Soviet occupation, a large part of the terms of film production in the Latvian were directly adopted from the Russian language, creating a specific professional jargon, but after the regaining of independence, the Russian jargons were rapidly replaced by Anglicisms, leaving the Latvian language on the outskirts of the professional (and also academic) film scene.

Inga Pērkone, PhD, is a Professor and Principal Researcher at the Latvian Academy of Culture and Head of the Riga Film Museum. She is the author of the books Afekti un atmiņas. Par sajūtām un Latvijas kino (Affects and Memories: On Sensations and Latvian Cinema, 2023); Ekrāna skatuve. Par aktiermākslu Latvijas kino (Stage of the Screen: On Acting in Latvian Cinema, 2020) Latvijas pirmās filmas (First Latvian Films, 2016), Tu, lielā vakara saule! Esejas par modernismu Latvijas filmās (Essays on Modernism in Latvian Films, 2013), Es varu tikai mīlēt... Sievietes tēls Latvijas filmās (The Image of Woman in Latvian Films, 2008), Kino Latvijā: 1920-1940 (Cinema in Latvia: 1920-1940) and the co-author and co-editor-in-chief of the books Latvijas kinomāksla. Jaunie laiki. 1990 – 2020 (Latvian Cinema: Recent History, 1990 – 2020), Inscenējumu realitāte: Latvijas aktierkino vēsture (History of the Latvian Fiction Films, 2011).

Liene Jākobsone, Eva Sommeregger, Dina Suhanova
Art Academy of Latvia 

Architecture of Power Architecture of Power. The case of Socialist Realism and Post-War Modernism 

Within the framework of the currently ongoing research project entitled “unLoc: Exploring the Synergy of Human and Machine Creativity in Architecture”, we are investigating the built heritage erected during the reign of the USSR in the urban built environment in Latvia, Poland and Romania: buildings and sites from Riga, Krakow, Warsaw, and Bucharest. Adopting a contemporary stance that employs de-colonialist thought and argues from a post-dependency perspective in particular, we are especially interested in the ways in which the power exercised by Moscow affected the peripheries of the USSR and its sphere of influence through the architectural styles of Socialist Realism and Post-War Modernism, as well as how these are subject to centre-periphery relationships. Architecture bears lasting witness to the hegemonic beliefs, values and ideologies that societies put forward. Our research is concerned with the architecture of power and its realisation—a concept that goes beyond the realms described by styles and typologies—we thus add to the existing art historical concepts the term totalitarian architecture, associated with the way a regime rules. The ways in which power and architecture meet are complex: the built environment is always about power relations. The dominant culture defines the ways in which the built environment is designed, constructed and used. Our research examines the relationship between the built environment and top-down power through a selection of case study buildings in Riga, Warsaw, Krakow and Bucharest, showcasing their similarities as well as differences in order to shed new light on this particular form of architecture from a peripheral, “minor” perspective, in contrast to the standard architectural canon that emphasises the authority of the centre.

Liene Jākobsone, PhD, is Director and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture at the Latvian Academy of Arts. Her research focuses on issues of design and architecture, particularly the ideological conditions that shape design practice and its outcomes. She explores the potential applications of non-traditional forms of inquiry and ways to promote criticality in design practice. She is trained in design and fine arts and has a degree in architecture. Liene is also a founding partner of the Riga-based architecture and design practice Sampling.
Dr. DI Eva Sommeregger, MArch, is a Vienna-based architectural researcher employing both practice-led and theoretical methods. She holds a diploma in architecture from the Vienna University of Technology, a master's degree in architectural design with distinction from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, and a doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Currently, she works as a Senior Scientist at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and as a Senior Researcher at the LMDA Research Institute of the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga.
Dina Suhanova is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture of the Art Academy of Latvia. Dina has a diploma in Architecture and a Master of Arts degree in History and Theory of Art and Culture. Parallel to architecture practice, Dina is engaged in teaching and administration of formal and informal architecture education, turning her interests toward processes, research and activities related to contemporary architecture culture. Dina has been an editor of numerous academic and non-academic publications and contributes with writings to local and international journals. 

Rita Broka
University of Latvia

Botanical tracking. The Cultural Landscape of Ikskile

Ikskile is a place of special significance on the cultural map of Latvia. From the end of the 12th century until the 70s of the 20th century, the main landmark of place was the steep bank of the river Daugava and the first stone building erected in the Baltics - a church. Today, the site of this object is characterized by an island surrounded by the waters of Daugava, on which the ruins of this church are located. Due to the construction of the Riga power plant, the contiguous district disappeared under water. From time to time in summer, when the water level of the reservoir is lowered, the river returns to its old banks, revealing a barren land marked by the scars of the past, ghostly concrete borders overgrown with weeds and the lingering question of what would have been if… The aim of the paper is to revise the post-Soviet landscape of the Ikskile area in the context of the local flora and the historical interrelations with it. In this case, the place is considered both as a center of human commerce and geophysical expansion and as a field of natural and cultural history and non-human interdependencies. Research will be conducted using an artistic research method that incorporates local plant knowledge and traditional dyeing practices and places these within the theoretical framework of cultural botany. Cultural botany embraces knowledge bases and techniques for the study of plants that incorporate the cultural context of living flora.

Rita Broka. Visual artist and researcher who draws on organic material and dyes, the multiple, complex cultural discourses with which the medium is entangled. Particularly interested in the multisensorial perception, various aspects of landscape and plant culture. Recently defended PhD Thesis at the Art Academy of Latvia, Assistant Professor at the University of Latvia.

10 APRIL, THURSDAY
SESSION 5 Postcolonial Discourses in Music

Olha Lihus
The Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University (Ukraine)

Ukrainian Music of the First Third of the 20th Century as a Space for Constructing National Identity: a Postcolonial Perspective

The concept of national identity holds significant importance in postcolonial art studies. This discourse appears relevant in the context of Ukrainian music of the first third of the 20th century – a period of its flourishing in terms of acquiring nationally expressive stylistic features and organically integrating into European modernism. At the same time, the Ukrainian musical culture of this period is perhaps the most complex research subject. Such complexity is explained by the rapid pace of historical events of that time, cultural differences among various Ukrainian regions that were part of different states until 1939, and the distortion of historical realities by the Soviet authorities, who deliberately destroyed Ukrainian art. Two significant aspects emerge in understanding the national identity of Ukrainian music of the first third of the 20th century. The first relates to the revival of cultural memory about Ukrainian musicians repressed by the totalitarian regime or those in exile. Although many of these names have already returned to the national culture in independent Ukraine, insufficient attention has been paid to the artists of the Eastern Ukrainian diaspora, whose heritage has been appropriated by Russians. Another aspect concerns the national specificity of composers’ creativity, which resonates with the trends of Western European modernism. Therefore, an important task is also to examine the works of Ukrainian composers in the context of European culture based on substantive arguments regarding stylistic similarities and differences. The report aims to: - outline the problematic field of studying the national identity of Ukrainian music of the first third of the 20th century; - draw attention to the prominent figures of the Eastern diaspora’s musicians; - suggest criteria for the national identification of these artists; - delineate the vectors of the style development of the Ukrainian modernists’ works within the context of European culture.

Olha Lihus is a musicologist, Ph.D. in Art Studies Associate Professor at the Department of Musicology and Musical Education of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University (Ukraine), in 2023, a Fellow of The Institute for Human Sciences (Austria). Research interests: Ukrainian Romanticism in the European cultural context; Ukrainian music of the first half of the 20th century: Modernistic discourse; Problems of music style and genre. Author of the books (in Ukrainian): ‘Ukrainian Piano Music of the 19th – early 20th century in the Context of European Romanticism’ (2017); ‘Music in Choreography’ (2021). Author of more than 40 scientific publications in Ukrainian and English Laureate of the National Contest of TV and Radio Programs ‘Kobzar Unites Ukraine’ (2015).
 

Kristiāna Vaickovska
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music

Reassessing the Legacy of Lūcija Garūta: A Postcolonial Perspective on Soviet-Era Latvian Choral Music

This paper examines the legacy of Latvian composer Lūcija Garūta (1902–1977) through a postcolonial lens, focusing on her a cappella choral works and their reception during and after the Soviet period. While Garūta’s contributions were recognized early in her career, Soviet authorities later marginalized her work due to its perceived individualism and pessimism. Her music, particularly her emotionally expressive choral compositions, conflicted with the Soviet aesthetic of optimism and collective ideals. Her choral music was excluded from the Song Festivals, a critical cultural institution in Latvia during the Soviet era, thereby silencing a significant part of her artistic output. 
This exclusion is indicative of broader postcolonial tensions in the arts, where Soviet cultural policies sought to suppress or reshape individual artistic expression, especially when it did not align with socialist realism or collective identity. Garūta’s choral music, often imbued with deep spiritual and emotional content, directly challenged these limitations, offering a more personal and introspective narrative. In the post-Soviet period, Latvia’s cultural reawakening has led to a reassessment of her work, leading to the inclusion of some of her compositions, such as her famous “Mūsu Tēvs” (Our Father), in the official canon of Latvian music. This recognition underscores the shifting understanding of her music and its place in Latvian cultural history.

Kristiāna Vaickovska is a conductor and music historian currently pursuing a PhD in historical musicology at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music (JVLMA) under the supervision of Dr.art. Lolita Fūrmane. She holds an Academic Master's degree in Musicology with a specialization in Music History and a Professional Master's degree in Choir Conducting. Her theoretical and practical knowledge of Baroque music has been further enriched through studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. Vaickovska serves as the head of the historical musicology class at JVLMA, as an invited lecturer, and as a researcher in the State Research Program CERS at JVLMA. She is also an expert at the Latvian Music Information Centre (LMIC). Additionally, she is a board member of the culture and art society “Musica Humana,” where she manages various music and interdisciplinary cultural projects.

Rima Povilionienė
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Prof. Dr.

Islets of Artistic Resistance: Early Electronic Music in Lithuania

The report focuses on electronic music experiments as expressions of the avant-garde in contemporary Eastern European music, presenting the case of Lithuania and with particular emphasis on the period of the Cold War. Despite the pressure of the authoritarian regimes and the Soviet ideology, academic composers behind the Iron Curtain managed to skillfully follow and reflect on musical ideas from neighboring Western Europe – or primitively imitate/copy them – while still expressing a broader desire for artistic freedom and independence in their music. Within the frameworks of the center-periphery model and the Nylon Curtain approach I will examine the earliest examples of musique concrète and the environmental and institutional issues in Lithuania since the 1960s. The 2016 discovery of the tape containing Vytautas Montvila’s electronic piece “Black Pantomime”, 1969/70, stimulated to start reconstructing the electronic music landscape in the country during Soviet regime. An examination of Montvila’s archive reveals the composer’s ongoing efforts to get in touch with the Western musical innovations and progressive ideas, including sending letters by post to various composers in Western Europe as well as to USA (e.g., John Cage, Elliot Carter). Among these efforts we face Montvila’s interest in electronic music, trying to get in contact with the authorities like Herbert Eimert, to whom he wrote requesting music scores and texts; in his correspondence with Russian composer Denisov, Montvila learned about Henri Pousseur’s 1970 book “Sur la musique expérimentale”, and so on. At the same time, Montvila’s case reflects a broader trend in the 1960s-1970s, when the radio environment in former Soviet countries gave composers the opportunity to engage with electronic technologies, enabling them to record and edit the technologically produced material. Remaining rarely performed and often secondary in the composers’ oeuvre, such electronic experiments still sparked alternative ideas in contemporary music while also demonstrating artistic resistance.

Rima Povilionienė holds a PhD in Art Research/Musicology. She is the member at the Lithuanian Research Council and the Lithuanian National Commission for UNESCO, professor at the Department of Musicology of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and assistant editor-in-chief of the "Lithuanian Musicology" journal. She was an editor at the Lithuanian National Philharmonic and has held internships at the Institute of Musicology at Leipzig University (2004), IRCAM (2012), Rochester University Eastman School course in Paris (2019) and Manifeste Academie/IRCAM (2019, 2022, 2023 and 2024). Her monograph "Musica Mathematica" (in Lithuanian, 2013) was awarded the Professor Vytautas Landsbergis Foundation Prize (the English edition published by Peter Lang in 2016). Recently, she has published a monograph "Vox Humana Craftsmanship", with co-authors Girėnas Povilionis and Diego Cannizzaro (Springer, 2022) and "Sounding Utopias. Trajectories and Contexts in Lithuanian Music Modernization", with Rūta Stanevičiūtė, Vita Gruodytė and Donatas Katkus (in Lithuanian, 2023).

SESSION 6    Shadows In and Over Our Heads

Mariia Lihus
National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy", Kyiv (Ukraine)

Postcolonial Irony in Ukrainian Cinema and Literature of the 1990s: Remaking National History

The centuries-long tradition of humor in Ukrainian art developed in the tragic background of colonization of Ukraine and its culture, where humor was a means of national resilience and anti-colonial сritic. In the 1990s, a liminal period in modern Ukrainian history, humor also became a way of national self-reflection rooted in the postcolonial discourse. Ukrainian artists appealed to humor to dispel still strong imperial narratives, strengthening a sense of national community and ironically reconsidering national history. Vadym Kastelli’s comedy film “Hunt for the Cossack Gold” (1993) and Vasyl Kozhelianko’s novel “Parade in Moscow” (1997) are illustrative examples of this postcolonial shift. Kastelli’s film ironically deconstructs the myth revived in the 1990s of Ukrainian 18th-century Hetman Polubotok’s treasures hidden in London as symbolic Ukrainian state’s legacy hunted by Russian imperialists, Soviet spies, British “capitalists”, and Ukrainian bandits. Hetman’s descendant – an ordinary Ukrainian farmer Ivan – is called to rescue the national treasure, which symbolizes Ukrainian independence, not knowing his nationwide mission and capabilities. From the same postcolonial perspective, Kozhelianko’s novel as a first in Ukrainian literature written in a genre of alternative history problematizes Ukrainian independence in the context of the post-war Europe of the 1940s, when Ukrainians defeated Russia. Both artistic works are ironically nostalgic: they do not express revanchist regret of failed past opportunities but demonstrate how the hectic present is connected with centuries-long Ukrainian history and dreams of freedom. Postcolonial nostalgia, thus, becomes a means to reintegrate contemporary culture and ironically reconsider national myths.

Mariia Lihus, Ph.D. in Philosophy (2021, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv), currently holds a position as a lecturer at the Department of Cultural Studies at the National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" in Ukraine. From 2022 to 2023, she served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Cinema and Philosophy at the Nova Institute of Philosophy, Nova University Lisbon, Portugal. In October 2023 – March 2024, she was a visiting scholar at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. Her research interests encompass performance studies, history of Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian cinema, and its history.

Māra Traumane
Art Academy of Latvia

“Close other” and its omissions. Place of the Baltic art histories in regional discussions in Eastern Europe since 2000

Since the fall of the “iron curtain” and the beginning of re-evaluation of art histories of Eastern Europe, there have been multiple attempts to theorize the relation of the regional art histories towards the West, or, more precisely, the Western canon of art history. My talk will ask the question: What was the position of the Baltic art histories of the 2nd half of the 20th century in these theoretical debates? Why have the voices of Baltic art historians acquired a louder international resonance only during the last ten-fifteen years, mainly in association with the concept of “horizontal art history," introduced by Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski, and the decolonial turn of the last years that gained strength in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine? 
Yet, why were histories of the Baltic states overlooked before in wider regional discussions and strains of study engaged in “decentring” Western canon? For example, in the corpus of projects critically examining the “otherness” or “close otherness” of the post-socialist art and culture in the 1990s or the cluster of publications addressing “Post-Communist Condition” (2003–2010). Why did the non-conformist perspective, despite its contribution of rewriting post-war art histories, never gain the unanimous support of the local researchers? Is it possible to detect a trace of colonial legacies in these approaches? How to identify different vectors of coloniality both in narratives of political domination and in intentional or unintentional coloniality of knowledge? My overview will also address the engagements with interpretations of socialist legacy in the recent research of Estonian and Lithuanian colleagues—art and architecture historians. Alongside historiographic perspective, my talk will introduce my study of the Stalinist cultural policies as a possibility of addressing the relevance of the decolonial perspective in the Baltic context.

Māra Traumane is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary Art Design and Architecture of the Art Academy of Latvia, art historian and curator. Her research focuses on artistic practices in Eastern Europe after WWII. From 2014 till 2017 she was a research fellow in the research project “Literatur und Kunst vor Gericht: Fokus Osteuropa” (Art and Literature on Trial. Focus Eastern Europe) at the Seminar for Slavonic Studies, University of Zürich. She is co-editor of the anthology “Kunst vor Gericht. Ästhetische Debatten im Gerichtssaal“ (Berlin: Matthes&Seitz, 2018, with Sandra Frimmel). Her articles on interdisciplinary art and performance in Eastern Europe, feminist reading of legacies of women artists and art of Socialist Realism in Latvia had been published in several international book publications as well as in the journal ARTMargins.

Radoslav Passia, Olha Norba
Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava (Slovakia)
 

The Footprints of the Normalization Era in the Slovak Cultural Memory (on the Example of Contemporary Memoir and Oral History Literature)
In the Slovak and Czech context, the term “normalisation” is understood as the period after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops until the end of the period of state socialism (1968-1989). This paper will attempt to reconstruct the contemporary image of normalisation in the memoirs and documentary genres of Slovak literature. We will focus on non-fiction texts and analyse not only their reflection of the occupation period before 1989, but also the current value-ideological perspective of their narratives. In these texts we note the motifs of social conformity and consent, but also of ideological resistance and cultural subversion. We are also interested in them as manifestations of a "transit culture" (T. Hundorova's term) reflecting the changed cultural-political situation after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. We will also attempt to compare selected genre- and theme-similar texts from other post-Soviet literary cultures, such as Czech, Ukrainian and East German. The aim is to show that post-dependence studies should work with scaling procedures to capture the specificities of power politics in particular social and cultural settings. For example, it is evident that in some cases de-colonial discourse after the collapse of the Soviet Union is linked to the national question and the search for a new cultural identity (Ukraine). However, Central European cultural elites have predominantly asked a different type of political question after the end of Soviet hegemony. “Decolonization” allowed Central Europe to reappear on the map of Europe as an independent region, but it also opened up a debate about the nature of political, cultural, and national power relations within the region. In Slovakia, there were several discussions about national identity and the reasons for the mental anchoring of part of the population in the post-Soviet world.

Radoslav Passia, Ph.D. completed his doctoral studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague (Ph.D. in Slavic literatures, 2012). He works as a senior researcher at the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of a number of books, among them: Na hranici. Slovenská literatúra a východokarpatský hraničný areál [On the Border. Slovak Literature and the Eastern Carpathian Border Area] (2014); Literárne krajiny Bratislavy. Obraz mesta po roku 1918 [Bratislava’s Literary Landscapes. Portrayal of the City After 1918] (2023); Home and the World in Slovak Writing. A Small Nation’s Literature in Context. Edited by K. Gephardt, Ch. Sabatos, and I. Taranenková (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025, in print).

Olha Norba is a PhD student at the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and her research focuses on the grey zone between official and samizdat literature in late socialism.

Deniss Hanovs
Art Academy of Latvia

Doomed to repeat? Discourses of decolonisation in contemporary Latvian memory politics

Since Putin’s memory politics shortly before and after 2014 Crimea annexation, Latvian societal discourses on security issues were added by issues of collective or social memory. Past as the dramatic and mythological, highly emotional field jas become the domain if memory, which subjugated history analysis which for Pierre Nora was the “killer” of memory as non-scientific awareness of past events, related to public issues. His academic warning has been questioned by the revived histories of the former Soviet mnemonic space in the Baltic region which freed itself from the control of the regime of communism. Traumas, collective experience of totalitarian crimes, became a predominant tool for politics of national and ethnic cohesion since Russia drifted away from European history discourses of the 20th century mnemonic politics. Decolonisation politics in Latvia public memory politics have until now not produced nee forms and formulas for societal cohesion beyond ethnicity defined in terms of rather exclusive traumatic experience. The political nation as a project of the future is still shaped by ethnicity, but, as Habermas had stated decades ago in his “postnational condition” analysis, society is larger in its diverse identities, then ethnic nation and thus political nation needs new territories, new forms and public images. These tools are, to my mind missing from memory politics, which after 02/2022 has taken new radical elements and goes into direction of exclusive and hierarchical forms, thus endangering the mnemonic consensus in the ethnically diverse society. What and how to treat the memories of the Other? Who is and who remains the Other in the contemporary attempts to decolonise Latvian memory politics? What goes wrong? These questions will be treated in the frame of revisiting post Soviet decolonisation politics. Are we heading towards a new/returned form of post Soviet coloniality and what are hidden risks for the sustainability of Latvian/European memory culture in contemporary disintegrated society of Latvia? That is the big question for the presentation.

Deniss Hanovs was born 1977 in Riga, studied at Latvian Academy of Culture, International cultural relations and later at MA level Theory of Culture. 2003 PhD on memory politics of Latvian National movement in media. Since 2003 has been teaching at diverse universities in Latvia, holding guest courses and lectures at University of Vienna and Berlin Free University. Topics of academic interest are diverse and include the following: social memory studies and memory politics in the Baltics since mid 19th century, politics of Soviet coloniality in Russian dissident novel of 1970s and 80s, European (Italian court opera of the 18th century).

SESSION 7 (THEMATIC PANEL) 
Emerging from the Iron Curtain: Navigating Europe in the Glasnost’ Era and Beyond 

This panel traces the chequered path of Soviet composers as they forged their reputations and futures in Western Europe, both in the glasnost’ era and post-1991. We aim to highlight processes, motivations and aspects of Western reception that are still poorly understand and even at risk of misrepresentation. Among these is the contention that music from former Soviet states was habitually lumped together as ‘Russian’; our research shows this was not generally the case, at least in Britain, where awareness of national identity could mirror British sensitivities, both as a similarly colonial power and as a nation itself comprising four distinct national territories. But perhaps the biggest challenge Soviet  composers faced was retaining relevance in the free market music economies of Western Europe and their often very different cultural priorities.
 
Fiona Jackson
University of Bristol (United Kingdom)

Musical exchange between Britain and the Baltic states and Georgia in the transition years of post-Soviet independence

The collapse of the USSR, and with it the removal of the region’s centrally controlled international diplomacy, gave post-Soviet states the individual task of creating new cultural relations with the West. Yet in researching British-Soviet musical exchange, it is clear that the sea-change in the focus of both grassroots and state-led cultural relations was already well underway before 1991. As the independence movements of the Soviet republics gained momentum, accompanied by growing media coverage in Western Europe, contemporary arts festivals in Britain increasingly started to profile music, film and theatre from the Baltics, Ukraine and the Caucasus. The broader picture of culture that resulted reduced the dominant profile of Russian artists and increased the visibility of music and other arts often labelled ‘unofficial’.
The British Government’s policy after 1989 of selecting priority Soviet republics, identifying which republics they wished to support culturally, impacted upon British grassroots arts organisations trying to collaborate with musicians and other artists from the USSR. This politically-inspired favouritism likewise restricted the opportunities available to post-colonial cultural institutions trying to establish partnerships overseas.
Using the examples of British musical and theatrical relations with the Baltic states and Georgia, this paper examines to what extent Western government’s political priorities influenced the ability of the newly independent cultural scene of these countries to engender interest among Western audiences – or whether personal connections established between high-profile artists held more sway. The paper explores how government policy on cultural exchange changed in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, facilitating the building of artistic relationships in different parts of the region. I examine whether the formerly symbiotic association between state-led and grassroots cultural exchange between Britain and the former Soviet republics became disentangled after 1991, and if so, what dictated artistic relations in its place.

Fiona Jackson. A PhD student in the Music Department of Bristol University, I am researching musical exchange between Britain and the Soviet Union from the mid Brezhnev years to the early years after the disintegration of the USSR (1967-1997). My research focuses on musical relations with the non-Russian Soviet and post-Soviet republics, particularly the Baltics and Georgia, and examines the close interconnection between state-led and grassroots exchange initiatives. Prior to my PhD, I obtained a Masters in East European and Russian Studies from the School of Slavonic Studies and East European Studies (SSEES) in London. I also had a career working for a business pressure group and as a freelance business journalist.

Kevin C. Karnes
Emory University (Atlanta, USA)

Between Unbridgeable Difference and Breathtaking Possibility: Hardijs Lediņš on the Transit Riga–(West) Berlin, 1988/1992

Perestroika and the reclaiming of Latvia’s republican independence radically reconfigured the landscape of possibility for that country’s artists, particularly regarding their ability to circulate among counterparts in the broader European world. This presentation considers both unexpected opportunities and insurmountable challenges presented by these transformations, as surfaced in a pair of Berlin residencies by the Latvian musician Hardijs Lediņš, first in 1988 and then in 1992. My research reveals surprising sources of support for some creatives at the end of Soviet empire, as well as the crushing inability of Western institutions – despite earnest and considerable efforts – to ease transitions into Western art-spaces for some of those same former-Soviet artists.
Drawing on archives in Riga and Berlin, I trace the complex route by which Lediņš’s first Berlin residency was arranged. Inaugurated by an overture from a West German curatorial organization to the Latvian Artists’ Union, the crucial role was played by the so-called Culture Committee of the Latvian KGB – which, long charged with controlling and monitoring East-West exchange, seems to have reimagined itself during perestroika as a supporter and promoter of Latvian artists abroad. Traveling along with a cadre of fellow Latvian avant-gardists, Lediņš’s work received a sensational reception in West Berlin, which paved the way for a fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) just months after the collapse of the USSR. This second Berlin residency for Lediņš, in 1992, was disastrous. Unmoored from the community of creatives that nurtured his work at home, and encouraged – however unwittingly – by his German sponsors to pursue an impossibly ambitious agenda, Lediņš experienced the great creative crisis of his life, which fundamentally altered the shape of his art in years to come. I close by reflecting on such pendulum swings experienced by artists on both sides of eroding geopolitical divides in these years, as euphoric visions of trans-European artistic community were sometimes met with cultural differences that proved impossible to surmount.

Kevin C. Karnes is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Music at Emory University (Atlanta, USA) and Visiting Professor of Musicology at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. Focusing largely on creative cultures of twentieth-century East Central Europe, his publications include Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (2021) and Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics: Selections from the Melngailis Collection (2014). He is currently researching and writing a book on new musics born of encounters on the transit Riga–(West) Berlin, entitled Electric Future: Berlin, Techno, the USSR, and the Dream of a New Europe.

Pauline Fairclough 
University of Bristol (United Kingdom)

From glasnost’ to the fall and beyond: late Soviet music through British ears

The presence of Schnittke, Denisov, Part and other late Soviet composers in British concert halls became familiar during the glasnost’ era and continued seamlessly across the collapse of the Soviet Union, well into the 1990s and early 2000s. For young listeners such as myself and my peers at Huddersfield when the contemporary music festival brought Gubaidulina, Schnittke and others to our tiny West Yorkshire town, this music was revelatory and experienced very intensely. It would be accurate to say that, for us, the cold war context was highly relevant, giving this often-challenging contemporary music an urgency that demanded our attention and sympathy. But reactions from seasoned professional critics were of course more nuanced: no more than a gentlest whiff of late cold-war sentiment can be discerned in most media coverage, and the sensationalism that had accompanied Shostakovich’s alleged memoir Testimony is almost nowhere to be found. 
In this paper I will discuss the period of this music’s reception in the West that Levon Hakobian felt was marked by condescension, short-termism (fading after 1991) and infused with the ‘intrigue’ of music composed behind the iron curtain. Although there are undoubtedly instances of such attitudes, I argue that they are rare in the British musical press; more common was a broader perspective – offered by both British composers and music writers -- that sought to make sense of these composers in a pan-European context.

Pauline Fairclough is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol. She is a cultural historian specialising in music and culture of the early Soviet period, and of Shostakovich in particular. Her publications include Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (Yale, 2016) and Dmitry Shostakovich (Critical Lives biography, Reaktion Books, 2019).

 

Separate report

Simo Mikkonen
University of Eastern Finland

Resisting the Russification of Soviet Estonia through musical networking, 1960-1985

The latter half of the 1980s in the Baltic Countries is known as the period of Singing Revolution. Musical cultures played important role in the national revival of all three republics. There is, however, little research about how the Singing Revolution came about. Historical narratives usually emphasize the hardship of national cultures under Soviet rule. In my presentation, I argue that national musical cultures were carefully nurtured through international networking and the basis created for a later national revival. For Estonia, Finland was an important contact point, through which contact with the rest of the western countries was possible. Particularly after 1965, when a constant ferry connection between Helsinki and Tallinn was established, chances for networking increased and intensified. Conductors like Neeme Järvi and Eri Klas, in particular, visited Finland and were active in conducting works by Estonian composers – and made sure they were seen as Estonian, rather than as Soviet composers. 
Instead of open resistance, musical networking formed an area of subtle resistance. By openly resisting the Soviet rule, Estonian artists allowed to travel, were easily denied their travel permits. In order to keep their networks alive, they needed to be able to travel, and therefore had to balance between authorities’ demands and attempts to emphasize Estonian culture. Through a few cases of notable Soviet Estonian musicians, this presentation focuses on subtle resistance against authorities and russification in Soviet Estonia.

Simo Mikkonen is Professor of Sociocultural Remembering at the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu). He is specialized in 20th Century Eastern European, particularly Soviet cultural history, cultural diplomacy of the Cold War era, and memory studies. He has published extensively on cultural, international and transnational East-West connections, particularly from the Soviet perspective, including edited volumes Beyond the Curtain: Entangled Histories of the Cold War-Era Europe (Berghahn 2015), Music, Art, and Diplomacy: East-West Cultural Interactions and the Cold War (Routledge 2016), as well as Entangled East and West. Cultural Diplomacy and Artistic Interaction during the Cold War (Degruyter 2019). He has also authored a multi-author monograph Networking the Russian Diaspora: Russian Musicians and Musical Activities in Interwar Shanghai (Hawaii UP 2019).

 SESSION 8   Language, Literature, Identity

Maria Ivanova
Tallinn University (Estonia)

Metamorphosis: Transformation of Linguistic and Cultural Identity
The discourse on the renouncement of the cultural legacy of Russian and Soviet domination (such as, Russian language and cultural products) and the reaffirmation of Ukrainian national and cultural identity has been fuelled by the ongoing Russian military aggression. What might be called “cultural decolonization” is a phenomenon currently unfolding in Ukraine, as many Ukrainians who used to be Russian-speaking and immersed in a Russian cultural context have started articulating their Ukrainianness through transition to Ukrainian language and cultural formations and a partial or complete abandonment of Russian. One of the most striking examples of this transition is a Ukrainian (originally a Russian speaker) writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko, who, after the occupation of his hometown of Donetsk, changed the language of his writing. His first work written in Ukrainian, a novel Modegreen (2019) captures the complexities, painfulness, and consequent liberation of such a linguistic and cultural transformation. This article aims to analyse the novel addressing the following questions. How is the experience of cultural self-decolonization (transition from the colonisers' language to the language of the colonised, and reaffirming one's Ukrainian identity) represented in the novel? How is Ukrainian culture, often associated with(in) Soviet and Russian cultural spheres, repositioned and considered within European and global contexts? What are the consequences of Soviet and Russian influence on the identity of people living in Donbas, a geographical and cultural borderland? In this article I intend to a) explore the role the author assigns to language and cultural formations in accessing and affirming one’s cultural and national identity; b) examine the results of Soviet cultural and identity politics in Ukraine as depicted in the text through Homi Bhabha's concepts of hybridity and Third Space, analysing their negative aftermath (including the elimination of collective memories of Soviet crimes, and national and cultural alienation).

Maria Ivanova is a second-year PhD student in Studies of Culture at Tallinn University. I specialise in postcolonial and memory studies, focusing on postcolonial identity and memory in Ukraine. My current research explores literary representations of transformations and negotiations of cultural identity in Ukraine, as well as the impact of collective memory on national identity. I aim to contribute to understanding the challenges of addressing the traces of cultural colonialism at both national and individual levels in the context of the ongoing war.

Viliam Nádaskay
Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Slovakia)

Unveiling and Covering. Statue as a Metaphor of Past in Slovak Poetry
Statues as monuments represent collective national past and are very susceptible to change; they get placed, moved, removed, destroyed, re-interpreted, misinterpreted, or forgotten. They are often treated as such in poetry; statues are imagined and analyzed as remembrance of the national past, and its symbolic ideological manifestation. This also applies to statues and their poetic portrayal that relate to the socialist iconography and its re-evaluation in various times in Slovak history. The paper analyzes three poems by Slovak authors. The first one is Odstraňovanie sôch (Removal of Statues; 1963) by Miroslav Válek which deconstructs the atmosphere of the Stalinist 1950 through the motif of smaller statues hidden inside larger statues, akin to matryoshka dolls. The second one is Mesto (The City; 1992) by Štefan Strážay which uses the image of covered socialist statues in the urban public space to metaphorically speak of an uncertain future and skepticism regarding the then-ongoing sociopolitical change. The third one is Odhaľovanie sochy Jánošík v Terchovej (The Unveiling of Jánošík Statue in Terchová; 2013) by Marcela Veselková which satirizes grandiose unveiling of the statue of the national hero, a bandit Juraj Jánošík, often misused by the socialist regime, as the ultimate symbolic representative of the nation. The paper shows how each of the poems, in different time and political context, materializes national history through the image of statue. It is a fitting metaphor: statues being teared down is one of the first demonstrative signs of change, a merely symbolic, but possibly powerful gesture that, as the poems assert, has to be taken with a grain of salt due to its pompous but often vague character. The memory that the statues carry is often problematic, fleeting and disconcerting, as evidenced in the poems as well.

Viliam Nádaskay obtained a PhD. degree in Slovak literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences with a dissertation on various forms of Slovak poetry of Socialist Realism. He was a co-author of the book Literary Landscapes of Bratislava (2023) which deals with the image of the Slovak capital city in literature after 1918. My research interests usually gravitate towards 20th century poetry, Socialist Realism, and literary culture.

Anita Rožkalne
Institute of Literature, Folklore and Arts, University of Latvia

A writer in the shadow of monuments
There are writers whose creative work has undergone significant changes over time, which is manifested both in the themes of the works, ideological positions, and aesthetics. Usually it is connected with the turning times of history. In Latvia, such a time is from 1940 to 1990, three successive occupations - the USSR, Nazi Germany, and the USSR. In the conditions of a rapid change of regimes, the ideological positions of the authorities change just as quickly, interpretations of events tend to be completely opposite, cultural memory is deformed, documentation is fragmentary and biased selection. Ideological stratifications in the process of art creation and reception become a problem of the nation's cultural memory, because even the researcher is unable to form a personal opinion about what happened and can only record the diverse range of facts and testimonies, leaving the finding of conclusions to the future. Most difficult, if the writer reworked his previously published works according to the new political situation. It is not uncommon to see such a personality and work as if divided into two parts: before the break of political views and after. The most striking example of such a personality is the writer Vilis Lācis (1904–1966). The Soviet authorities glorified him as a Soviet statesman. During the post-war period, V. Lācis was the most translated Latvian author. However, in Latvia, his name was also associated with the signature on the documents of the population's deportation carried out by the occupying power. Information about the life and works of the writer and the attitude towards his personality are contradictory in different periods. Such problem is often solved by analyzing the context in which facts, developments and phenomena occurred. Consistent supplementing of contextualization with recontextualization is less frequently used, but worth trying.

Anita Rožkalne. Doctor of Philology, leading researcher of the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art (ILFA) of the University of Latvia. The results of her research on Latvian writers have been published in monographs Lauva. Dzejniece Astrīde Ivaska (Lioness: poetess Astrīde Ivaska, 2012); Kārļa Zariņa burvju aplis (Kārlis Zariņš's Magic Circle, 2016); Brīvie vektori. Versija par Gundegu Repši (Vector Freedom. Version about Gundega Repše, 2022), on the interaction between Latvian post-war diaspora and Latvian writers Palma vējā (Palm in the Wind, 1998). She has also worked in the field of comparative literature, together with her colleagues published research on Latvian literature in the collective monographs Latvia and Latvians (2018) and Latvija: kultūru migrācija (Latvia: Migration of Cultures, 2019).
 

SESSION 9 (THEMATIC PANEL)    
Soviet Traces on Some Aspects of the Georgian Musical Landscape

Otar Kapanadze
Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire (Georgia)

Soviet Heritage and Its Traces in Georgian Musical Folklore

Like other Soviet republics, using art as an ideological tool was a typical practice in Soviet Georgia. Georgian folk music was also employed to propagate communist ideas. While paying attention to the traditional repertoire, the also regime aimed to create new Soviet folk music for the new Soviet people. Soviet ideology influenced both the musical language and performance norms of Georgian folk songs, as well as the traditional instrumental culture. An analysis of the genre basics of Soviet folk songs reveals that, similar to the revolutionary songs of the pre-Soviet era, these songs utilized traditional musical material. However, they also introduced a number of features that were alien to Georgian traditional music: new collectives, performance forms, harmony and rhythm, new folk instruments, and pseudo-folk songs. The non-traditional musical characteristics that emerged during the Soviet period continued to exist in independent Georgia. A significant portion of what is now considered modern folklore (in terms of style, musical language, and instruments) is based on Soviet cultural heritage.

Otar Kapanadze, ethnomusicologist, doctor of Arts (dissertation: Georgian Round-Dance Songs: Peculiarities of Musical Language. Tbilisi, 2014). Associate professor of Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire. Dean of the faculty of composition and musicology at the same university. Tbilisi E. Mikeladze Central Music School Teacher. 2008-2012 was radio presenter of ,,Folkradio’’ and the author of several ethnomusicological broadcast. 2012-2014 was coordinator in regions of Folklore State Centre. Is member of about 20 ethnomusicological expeditions.

Natalia Zumbadze
Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire (Georgia)

Georgian Traditional Music of the Post-Soviet Period: Main Trends

Georgian traditional music of the post-Soviet period is a complex and contradictory phenomenon. On one hand, it inherits the ancient musical culture of the Georgian people, characterized by its originality - polyphonic thinking, dialectal variety, and a high level of development that distinguishes it among the musical cultures of the world. On the other hand, it directly continues the music from the 70-year Soviet era, which differs significantly from the traditional style. Research into traditional music from the post-Soviet period is a relatively recent innovation in Georgia, as it requires an objective understanding and adequate evaluation of the lengthy Soviet experience, which takes time to develop. The general picture and main trends reflecting the state of traditional music in the post-Soviet period are more or less consistent across all ethnographic areas of Georgia. However, the peculiarities and levels of development of local musical traditions account for significant differences among them. In this regard, one region of Western Georgia - Achara is particularly noteworthy; its music is clearly distinguished by the abundance and popularity of Soviet-themed songs. A comparative study of the musical material I recorded during my ethnomusicological expeditions in Achara (Shuakhevi and Khulo municipalities) in 2016 and 2022, along with phonorecords from earlier expeditions, reveals a significant change in the local singing and instrumental traditions. This change indicates a deterioration of the Acharan musical dialect, leading to the disappearance of its original features and their replacement with foreign (sometimes non-Georgian) elements. It would be inaccurate to explain these changes without considering the dual occupation of Achara.

Natalia Zumbadze. Ethnomusicologist, Doctor of Arts, Professor, Head of Ethnomusicology Direction of Tbilisi State Conservatoire, scientific worker at the Anzor Erkomaishvili Folklore State Centre, a co-founder and member of womens folk ensemble Mzetamze, the founder and director of the Conservatoire Student Folk ensemble, laureate of the Folklore National Award. Leader and participant of over 70 field expeditions and recording sessions. A participant of International Exchange Programs, numerous International Conferences and Symposia in Georgia and abroad. Author of over 60 scientific publications. Author and scientific director of ethnomusicological conferences and concerts of traditional music. Experienced in publishing activities, in teaching Georgian traditional music to foreigners

David Shugliashvili
Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire (Georgia)

My Family’s "Home Music", Suppressed by the Soviet Regime

Compared to the repressive regime of the 1930s, post-Stalinist Georgia in the late 1950s and 1960s seemed to experience a new wave of freedom, creating a cultural oasis. The loosening grip of Soviet ideology and the first cracks of the Iron Curtain were met by a new generation brimming with creative talent and inspiration. Evidently, numerous works from various fields of art created during this period continue to nourish Georgia's cultural life.
In this context, I would like to speak about my parents, whose work remains an enduring source of inspiration for new generations.
Today, everyone in Georgia knows the singer and songwriter Inola Gurgulia (1929-1977), the first Georgian female bard. However, during the 1950s to 1970s, when she composed her songs, they were largely suppressed both by Soviet nomenclature and by professional musicians. Despite significant public interest, their performance was restricted, pushing them into the underground scene of the time. The primary reason for this suppression was their musical aesthetic - an alien musical language that did not align with the standards imposed by Soviet censorship.
Mikheil Shugliashvili (1941-1996), a pioneer of Georgian avant-garde music, was respected among musicians but was even more disregarded by the Soviet state. Due to his innovative ideas and non-conformist positions, his works were almost never performed. This is why as a child I called his music I heard at home "home music". Today, the name of this composer is gaining increasing recognition in Georgia, and even more so in Europe and the United States.
Inola Gurgulia and Mikheil Shugliashvili - their works continue to inspire innovation in two distinct genres of Georgian music and stand as catalysts for liberation from postcolonial complexes.

David Shugliashvili, doctor of musicology, specialist in church music, ethnomusicologist, associate professor. He is honored for reestablishing Georgian church chant and restoring it to the divine service. He is the head of the Ensemble Anchiskhati (Anchikhsti Choir), works at the National Library of Georgia as the Head of the Musical Department, and teaches at Tbilisi State Conservatoire and Giorgi Mtatsmindeli Higher Educational Institution of Ecclesiastical Chant. He is the author of about thirty scientific works and articles and was awarded the Artem Erkomaishvili Prize for the fundamental scientific work. He is the author of several musical collections of Georgian traditional folk songs and chants. Additionally, he has transcribed his mother's songs for the collections: 'Inola Gurgulia - My Songs' and 'I Won't Grow Old'.

 

11 APRIL, FRIDAY

Session 10 (THEMATIC PANEL)

Searching for Musical Identity and Belonging in Post-Yugoslav Serbia

The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and the subsequent political collapse of the socialist state led to a mass exodus of composers and academics. Such a sudden departure of nearly an entire generation of Serbian composers and pedagogues had a severe (and thus far irrevocable) impact not only on Serbian art music but also on higher education and, consequently, stifling the creation of a new generation of composers. The demise of multi-ethnic and multi-religious Yugoslavia, a politically dynamic and volatile region that has changed its borders, names, and political systems several times since the beginning of the twentieth century, left composers—those who stayed behind and who left—to search for their (musical) identities. The collection of essays in this panel examines the composers’ redefinition of musical identities and a sense of belonging in post-Yugoslav Serbia.                

Ivana Medić
Principal Research Fellow Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Serbia)

Not Quite European: The Case of “Invisible” Serbia 

The paper was inspired (albeit not quite positively) by Björn Heile’s recent book Musical Modernism in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2024). In this book, marketed as “the first study of the global dimensions of musical modernism,” Heile attempts to bypass both historical-Eurocentric and contemporary postcolonial discussions of modernism by focusing on transnational “entanglements” between “the West” and “other world regions” (read: parts of Central and South America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific). A striking – but not unexpected – omission is that of post-socialist Eastern Europe, which is routinely overlooked both by writers promoting the standard Western-centric concepts of modernism, and those such as Heile, who aim at revisionism and inclusion. Thus, by “Europe,” they still mean the area west of the river Oder, excluding what was once known as “the Second World” (i.e., the now-defunct Warsaw Pact and allied countries). In this paper, the author aims to scrutinize the reasons for the continuous neglect and invisibility of countries such as Serbia, located in South-East Europe but conceptually excluded from the notion of “Europe” (not least because it is not an EU-member state). As a case study, she will analyze the events surrounding the centenary of the birth of one of Serbia’s greatest 20th-century symphonists, Vasilije Mokranjac (1923–1984), and examine why his oeuvre is still largely unknown in the West, but also neglected in his own country. I will discuss how a country such as Serbia should make its artistic legacy more visible, and whether implementing the postcolonialist discourse would benefit or harm that goal––not least because postcolonial narratives are incompatible with the present-day socio-political situation in which Serbia is being colonized by international corporations targeting its natural resources, workforce and industry. 

Ivana Medić is a Principal Research Fellow of the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a Full Professor at the Department of Multimedia Design at the Faculty of Computing in Belgrade. She serves as President of the Serbian Musicological Society. An alumna of the University of Manchester, where she received her doctorate in 2010, she has served as a convenor of the BASEES/SEEM Study Group since 2011. Her multifaceted work encompasses scientific research, various activities in the domain of applied musicology, extensive work in the media, and concert performances. She has led many national and international projects and served as an expert of the European Commission since 2022. She has won several awards for outstanding contributions to Serbian musicology.

Laura Emmery
Associate Professor of Music Theory Emory University (Atlanta, USA)

Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Search for Identity, Place, and Belonging 

Aleksandra Vrebalov (b. 1970) describes her opus, comprising over one hundred works, as an exploration of the themes of identity, place, and belonging. Like many of her peers, Vrebalov left Yugoslavia in 1995 during the decade-long civil war and emigrated to the United States, partaking in the scattering of a population “from a common point of origin and the communities that form as a result,” a condition often described as “placelessness”: not fully belonging to any one place or another, being instead in-between, neither completely here nor there (Alajaji 2016). This type of displacement creates “both place and homelessness, wandering and the dream of return” (P. Bohlman 2020). For Vrebalov, the displacement poses an additional challenge in that the country she left behind, Yugoslavia, no longer exists. Although both the United States and Novi Sad, Serbia, provide Vrebalov with a sense of a place, home, and belonging, she continues to long for her homeland that no longer exists, as postwar Serbia is only a fragment of the “place” she once called home. Vrebalov expresses this nostalgia through her music, which is imbued with Serbian and Yugoslav folk idioms and motives. In this essay, I examine Vrebalov’s approach to asserting her sense of identity, place, and belonging in her chamber works, Pannonia Boundless (1999), …hold me, neighbor, in this storm… (2008), and My Desert, My Rose (2016). 

Laura Emmery is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). Her current research examines political, social, and cultural events that led to the momentous avant-garde and experimental music scene in Yugoslavia and the country’s role in the Cold War cultural diplomacy. Laura is working on a monograph, Cold War Cultural Diplomacy: Music Festivals in Yugoslavia. She is also the author of Yugoslav Avant-Garde Music, 1945–1991 (forthcoming), Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1: Myths, Narratives, and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy (2024), The Origins of Yugoslav Musical Minimalism (2024), Elliott Carter Speaks: Unpublished Lectures (2022), and Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets: A Study in Sketches (2020).
 

Ivana Miladinović Prica
Assistant Professor of Musicology Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia Fulbright Scholar, Emory University (Atlanta, USA)

International Review of Composers in Belgrade in the Post-Yugoslav Context 

The collapse of socialist Yugoslavia included the disappearance of “the Yugoslav artistic space” as well as de(con)struction of the Yugoslav identity. Yugoslav artists were deprived not only of their homeland but also of the institutional network––festivals, audiences, markets, publishers, and cultural dialogue and exchange. It was precisely during this turbulent transitional period––the change of ideological and cultural models in Serbia, despite the isolation and sanctions––that contemporary musical creativity gained its institutional strongholds. Most notably, in 1992, the International Review of Composers was founded in Belgrade as a replacement for the Yugoslav Music Panel in Opatija and Music Biennale Zagreb, and the Ensemble for New Music was founded. These institutional spaces created a favorable climate for the continuity of contemporary musical creativity, preservation of professionalism, as well as communication with the international music scene. At a time of broken relationships and narrowing geographical and cultural space, the festival’s founders—composers and members of the Composers’ Association of Serbia—envisaged the International Review of Composers as a type of symbolic public forum where it would be possible to establish a critical viewpoint. At the first festival edition, all participants signed an Open Letter to the Public, strongly protesting against the ruling regime and its war policy. As a product of the transitional post-Yugoslav period, yet at the same time “a project left over from the previous period, something that time, while disappearing, left behind as a tradition” (Premate 2007), the International Review of Composers has shown that zero hours and precise cuts in cultural post-Yugoslav systems are not possible, but only multidirectional transitions and changes, which will be discussed in this paper. 

Ivana Miladinović Prica is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Faculty of Music of the University of Arts in Belgrade (Serbia). She is currently (2024–25) a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Emory University (Atlanta, GA). Her research explores the institutionalization and dissemination of musical experimentalism in Serbia and Yugoslavia, specifically within the context of the Cold War cultural diplomacy, the work of John Cage, and recent musical creativity in Serbia. She has published two books, several edited volumes, and numerous articles in journals, such as Contemporary Music Review, New Sound, AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, Tacet, and Glissando. She has also collaborated in several notable international exhibitions, including Freedom of Sound: John Cage behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest), Music in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Belgrade), and The Origins of Yugoslav Musical Minimalism (Belgrade). She currently serves as Vice-President of the Serbian Musicological Society.

Ivana Ilić
Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory Emory, University (Atlanta, USA) Assistant Professor of Music Theory, Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade (Serbia)

Identity, Place, and Space in Post-Yugoslav Electronic Music: Three Case Studies 

There is an intriguing parallelism in Serbian social and music history at the turn of the twenty-first century. In 1991, after the painful dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, the new reality included the traumatic disintegration and fragmentation of virtually all domains of human life, including the art sphere. In the following years, a process of reconstructing the lost identity and reinventing what seemed like safe (physical) and meaningful (imagined) spaces began to unfold. At the same time, building on the modernist tradition of working with archaic or folk music material as an impetus for contemporaneity, electronic music composers started utilizing the techniques enabled by the electronic medium to achieve the “internationalization of the folklore” and “the ‘folklorization’ of the international” (Veselinović-Hofman). This procedure implied an “exchange” between the two musical materials that resulted in de-essentialization of their national and international potentials in the constructed and disembodied electronic reality of a work. Although in the years that followed Serbian composers refrained from any politically engaged music, they musically responded to the political context in various ways. In one strand of those responses, the musical material, as the signifier of specific physical and imagined spaces, became vital. In this presentation, I examine the treatment of that material in three electronic pieces from three distinct moments following the breakup of Yugoslavia: Lacrymosa (1993) by Ivana Stefanović, A Nocturne of Belgrade Spring (1999) by Srđan Hofman, and White City (2008) by Katarina Miljković.

Ivana Ilić is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). Her research fields include the role of technology in the creative outputs of women composers and performers, the history and epistemology of music theory, and contemporary Serbian music. She has also written on the topics of music and gender studies and the role of musical institutions in cultural politics in Serbia. Her research has been published in Contemporary Music Review, New Sound: International Journal of Music, and Anklaenge: Wiener Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, among others. Ivana Ilić is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Serbian Society for Music Theory.

SESSION 11   Art in transition: opera and film

Tereza Havelková
Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic)

Postcolonial Perspectives on Opera from East Central Europe

What insights can post- and decolonial theory offer to the study of operatic cultures in East Central Europe? And what ramifications does this perspective have for opera studies more generally? In the past two decades, opera studies has grown more transnational, and it has gradually recognized opera’s entanglement in coloniality. Yet, opera from East Central Europe has remained a blind spot in these considerations. 
In this paper, I will focus on three interrelated aspects of ECE opera cultures that may productively be approached through post- and decolonial theory, as it has been developed for the study of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe (e.g. Huigen and Kołodziejczyk 2023; Pucherová and Gáfrik 2015). First, the use of opera as a tool of Soviet hegemony, focusing on the imposed programming of Soviet opera within the Eastern Block, which may be understood as an attempt at cultural colonization. Second, the operatic representation of the Other, especially from the Global South, in post-war opera from ECE. And third, the ways opera has been employed as a means of reshaping national identities in the region both before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. I will draw on examples from the former Czechoslovakia and today’s Czech Republic. 
My approach is based on the recognition of the double bind specific to the region’s (post)colonial condition. On the one hand, the region has experienced the coloniality of power through various structures of dependence. On the other hand, it cannot claim “colonial innocence” (Rampley 2021) or “colonial exceptionalism” (Herza 2020), as it participated, in various ways, in both intra-European domination and overseas colonial projects. I will suggest that a postcolonial perspective on opera from East Central Europe fosters a decentered and multidirectional approach to opera more generally, beyond the binary of metropolis and (post)colony.

Tereza Havelková is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Charles University in Prague. Her research concentrates on contemporary relationships between opera and the media, and the intersection of aesthetics and politics in music theatre. She is the author of Opera as Hypermedium: Meaning-Making, Immediacy, and the Politics of Perception (Oxford University Press 2021), and co-editor of the special issue “Sounding Corporeality” of Theatre Research International (46.2; 2021). Her most recent publications include Sound, Gender, Identity: Studies in Cultural Analysis of Music (in Czech, co-edited with Vít Zdrálek, Karolinum 2024), and Music Theater and Politics: (Re)thinking Histories, Decentering Perspectives (co-edited with Marcus Tan, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She is the convenor of the Music Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

Lauma Mellēna-Bartkeviča
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music (Latvia)

Turbulent waters of freedom: opera in transition. Latvian case

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 marks a turbulent historical period in the history of Latvia and in the processes in performing arts and opera, respectively. My case study traces the transitions in opera and musical theatre in Latvia at the time, focusing on changes in the “industry” and their impact to the current state of affairs in the field. The socio-historical changes of the decade opened the door to international studies and career opportunities for a few Latvian opera soloists, who dared to dive into the unknown in all possible senses. The transitions affected their professional development, careers, social life and employment models in the international opera industry, providing the unprecedented individual experiences. The research aims to document and analyse the undocumented history of Latvian National opera between 1991 and 1995, when the only opera theatre building in Latvia was closed for major repair works, as well on impact of this circumstance to the artistic processes within the company and in the industry in general in the following years until today.

Lauma Mellēna-Bartkeviča, PhD, is music and theatre critic and academic researcher at Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. Main research interests cover such fields as opera, music theatre and music culture both from the historical and contemporary perspectives. Since 2020, Lauma Mellēna-Bartkeviča is the editor-in-chief of the only Latvian musicology journal Mūzikas akadēmijas raksti. Publishes reviews and articles in Latvian periodicals since 2004. In 2020, edited “Contemporary Latvian Theatre 2010-2020. A Decade Bookazine” in English.

Kristaps Opincāns
Latvian Academy of Culture (Latvia)

Early Conceptual Approaches of Film Education in Latvia

After regaining independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Latvia experienced a profound shift in its cultural and educational landscapes. In the wake of this transformation, early efforts to establish film education in Latvia reflected both the desire to break away from Soviet ideological control and the need to reimagine Latvian identity through new artistic frameworks. The postcolonial condition, emerging from decades of Soviet rule, created a unique context for the development of film education as a tool of cultural decolonization. Conceptual approaches taken by educators and filmmakers during this period aimed to construct a national film curriculum that was free from Soviet influence. However, this was not only an effort to break from the past, but also an opportunity to embrace new global perspectives. The intersection of post-Soviet identity, Western cultural integration, and the redefinition of cinematic expression played a crucial role in how film education became a site of cultural re-assessment and artistic renewal. Film education during this period was not just about teaching cinema as a craft; it also served as a platform for negotiating postcolonial identity and fostering a new generation of filmmakers. These educators sought to introduce global perspectives into film studies, while also maintaining a sense of national uniqueness. By situating these early efforts within the broader discourse of postcolonialism, the role of film education in Latvia's search for cultural autonomy and creative self-determination can be highlighted. The long-term influence of these initiatives continues to shape contemporary film education and the cultural institutions of Latvia today.

Kristaps Opincāns, Mg.art. is doctoral student at Latvian Academy of Culture.

Zane Balčus
Vilnius University, Latvian Academy of Culture (Latvia)

Shifting Perspectives of Subjectivity in Documentary Filmmaking in the Baltic countries

During the Soviet era, within the centralised cinema system, subjective approaches in documentary films represented a small fraction of the productions in the Baltic countries. Some filmmakers ventured to adopt a more pronounced position of subjectivity, including physical presence on screen and self-reflexivity, during a time when neutrality and apparent objectivity dominated as the primary artistic expressions in documentary cinema. After the restoration of independence, as the film industries began to establish new models integrated into the European film industry, which embraced opportunities for collaboration and witnessed the technological shift from analogue to video and later to digital formats, first-person narratives became more prevalent (e.g., family stories, formative personal events, historical re-evaluation, and others). The changes in film production system enabled also a more recognised self-expression of the filmmaker’s position, and thus, documentary cinema transitioned to a greater emphasis on subjectivity, personal narrative, and the representation of reality through performative and reflexive modes of documentary. In this paper, I will focus on films from the late Soviet period and the early years of reinstated independence in the Baltic states, which reflect a shifting paradigm in how filmmakers capture reality. No longer seen as something that can be firmly fixed and clearly presented, reality now opens up possibilities for personal explorations, told from a first-person perspective, in which experiences from the transition period and the Soviet era are explored and reevaluated using new artistic expressions and addressing previously inaccessible topics.

Zane Balčus, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at Vilnius University (Lithuania) and researcher at the Latvian Academy of Culture. Balčus has contributed to several books on Latvian cinema ("Latvijas kino: jaunie laiki. 1990-2020" ("Latvian Cinema: Recent History, 1990-2020", Riga: 2021), "Rolanda Kalniņa telpa" ("Cinematic Space of Rolands Kalniņš", Riga: 2018), "Inscenējumu realitāte. Latvijas aktierkino vēsture" ("Reality of Fiction. History of Latvian Fiction Film", Riga: 2011)), she writes academic articles and is a freelance film critic, as well as an independent curator. Balčus was the director of the Riga Film Museum of the Latvian Academy of Culture (2014-2019). Balčus is also a project manager of the documentary industry event Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries in Riga, Latvia.

SESSION 12   Let her shine: females in the spotlight

Laine Kristberga
Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia

Beyond the Gaze: Radical Aesthetics in Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011) and Anna Maskava's (1990) Photography

Through comparative analysis, this paper will address the radical aesthetics and feminist strategies in the works of two Latvian female photographers, Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011) and Anna Maskava (1990). Dzividzinska was one of the first female artists in Latvia to experiment with the possibilities of photography and performance in the 1960s. By creating conceptual tableau performances and synthesising photography with performance, Dzividzinska intuitively practiced transgressive artistic strategies reminiscent of contemporary photography, and thus stood out from the aesthetic conventions in photography pursued in the patriarchal culture of photo clubs as well as in a broader context of the dogmatic Socialist Realism. Dzividzinska engaged with the themes of female agency, motherhood, female gaze and femininity contrary to the dominant or ideologically saturated mainstream. Anna Maskava, working in a contemporary post-Soviet context, extends this legacy by incorporating performance art, photography, and natural materials—such as blood, horns, and insects—to explore the boundaries between human and non-human agency. Maskava’s work reflects a shift from Dzividzinska’s focus on the human-centered feminist gaze to a more expansive, posthumanist perspective. By transforming organic objects into performative entities, Maskava interrogates the fluidity of identity, ancestry, and bodily integrity, further challenging anthropocentric paradigms. By comparing the feminist aesthetics of these two artists, this paper will illuminate the transformation of feminist aesthetics in Latvian art, examining how female artists have addressed and subverted the gaze over different historical and cultural contexts. The key arguments will center on themes such as female agency, body politics, posthumanism, and the integration of performance into photography, identifying how these artistic strategies challenge patriarchal conventions and anthropocentric thinking. The reciprocity between Dzividzinska and Maskava highlights how feminist narratives in art have changed from the Soviet era to contemporary Latvia, enriching the discourse on radical aesthetics and multispecies relations.

Laine Kristberga, PhD, is an expert of Latvian Council of Science, a researcher and the Head of Arts Department at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Latvia and also a guest lecturer at the Art Academy of Latvia. Laine is the director of Latvian Centre for Performance Art and the chief curator of the international Riga Performance Art Festival Starptelpa. Laine’s research interests cover the history and political aspects of performance art in Latvia and the region, especially during the period of soviet occupation.

Inga Kontkanen
University of Eastern Finland

Embodied trauma and postcolonial experience in Russian women´s poetry

The fall of the hammer and sickle and the collapse of the Soviet Empire undoubtedly caused tremendous and profound shifts and effects on the whole world history, geopolitics, economy and culture. The very existence of the Soviet national identity and gender paradigms had been shaken and faced a deep crisis reflected both on the societal communal level and in the private life of the individuals. This major upheaval had been addressed by post-Soviet literature in general and poetry in particular in the attempt to embrace and reflect on the new transitional state to postcolonial reality. Women poetesses strived to find out or invent new adequate ways for depiction and conceptualization of the variety of lived experience they had been facing. Being positioned in the middle of the widening rift between the crumbling Soviet totalitarian ideals and the novelty introduced by the democratic tendencies, authoresses struggled to ensure a place for women in the post-Soviet space. By deconstructing and reassembling the corporeal images such poetesses as Nina Iskrenko and Elena Shvarts resisted to female sexual commodification that became widespread during the perestroika era. Overcoming the imposed stereotypes, Iskrenko and Shvarts were seeking to return the agency to women over their own bodies and subjectivity.

Inga Kontkanen is a doctoral researcher in the School of Humanities, Foreign Languages and Translation Studies at the University of Eastern Finland (Doctoral Programme in Social and Cultural Encounters), majoring in Russian language and culture. The main focus of the research is the study of the representations of the embodied gender experience and sexuality in Russian modern women´s poetry.

Kateryna Ielysieieva 
National Academy of Culture and Arts Management (Ukraine)

Female leadership in the opera art of the postcolonial South-Eastern Europe
(by the example of the opera festival “Operosa”)

The research is devoted to the modern opera festival «Operosa» in Montenegro that was founded by the famous Finnish mezzo-soprano Katherine Haataja in 2006. In the postcolonial discourse the proposed research examines the gender aspect of the decolonization process, as well as the “Western” and “Soviet”influence vectors on the opera art development in the postcolonial South-Eastern Europe.
It is necessary to be noted, that despite the focus of the postcolonial theory is primarily on philosophy, literary and political studies, postcolonialism is broader phenomenon. It equally extends to such arts, as music and theater, as well as other, which are manifestation of the social life. In this regard interdisciplinary approach opens up great opportunities for research.
The opera festivals in the countries of South-Eastern Europe during the era of the influence of the Soviet ideology had a factor of informality, which was of great importance as it made it possible to some extent to avoid the Soviet dictatorship and the Iron Curtain through art.
Nowadays, opera festivals expanded their geography to the countries of South-Eastern Europe that were already free from Soviet influence. At that time another paradigm of this musical practice type emerged: opera festivals «open-air» became widespread. Cultural and historical objects and natural attractions began to be used as their interiors. In 2006 the striking phenomenon and unusual initiative in this trend, the opera festival “Operosa”, was organized by the famous Finnish mezzo-soprano Katherine Haataja. At first, the festival was held in Bulgaria, in the former royal residence of Evksinograd near Varna, and then the festival moved to Montenegro, where it is now held in Herceg Novi. This original initiative not only promotes the art of opera in its region, but reaches a new level through independence, creativity of opera productions and the involvement of young talents in opera performance. Thus, in the postcolonial period of South-Eastern Europe, female leadership in this area exists on the opera stage and in the founding and management of musical and theatrical festival events.

Kateryna Ielysieieva was born in Kharkiv (Ukraine). First studied piano and in the Kharkiv Special Music School and then in the Kharkov Institute of Arts. She had Master's studies on piano, harpsichord and organ in National Music Academy (Bulgaria). She participated in the concerts with orchestra of Kharkov Filarmonic Society, in the festival «Kharkiv assemblies» and in the Alessandro Casagrande International Piano Competition (Italy). She participates in the concerts as a harpsichordist, organist, pianist. She worked as Accompanist and Senior Lecturer at National Academy of Culture and Art Management in Kiyv and took part in the national and international conferences as a musicologist. She has the publications in musicological journals. Now she relocated to Athens (Greece).

Orkhan Aghayev
University of Warsaw

On My Native Land, I'm Already a Stranger": Post-Soviet Women Artists Reshaping Narratives of Empire 

The collapse of the Soviet Union left behind complex legacies that continue to shape the political, social, and cultural landscapes of post-Soviet countries. While much scholarly attention has been directed at Eastern and Central Europe, regions like the Caucasus and Central Asia remain overlooked. In these regions, women artists have emerged as powerful voices of resistance, using their creative expressions to reshape narratives of empire and challenge the colonial legacies of Soviet rule. These legacies are marked by generational trauma, rising nationalism, deep-rooted conservatism, and complex struggles over national identity across post-Soviet states.
This research focuses on Tajik-Russian singer Manizha Sanghin, whose music videos serve as a platform to confront national identity struggles, post-Soviet interethnic conflicts, and societal taboos. Additionally, it expands to include other transformative artists—such as Zere Asylbek (Kyrgyzstan), Dihaj, Gulyaz & Gulyanag (Azerbaijan), and Lola Yuldosheva (Uzbekistan)—each of whom uses music videos as a medium to explore themes of post-independence identity struggles, gender, social justice, and resistance to authoritarianism.
Inspired by theorists like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Madina Tlostanova, and Dorota Kołodziejczyk, the analysis highlights how these music videos embody a decolonial aesthetic, functioning as artivism in spaces where traditional activism is often suppressed. These artists engage with topics such as racism, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and authoritarianism, often defying governmental and societal censorship to subvert post-colonial narratives and confront the colonial residue of Soviet multiculturalism, Russification, and cultural erasure.
Through a critical analysis of their video clips and their reception, this study delves into how popular music intersects with broader decolonization efforts in conservative post-Soviet societies. Together, these women not only challenge dominant political structures that silence dissenting voices but also reimagine imperial narratives, confront the status quo, and address the enduring impact of Soviet colonialism.

Orkhan Aghayev,  PhD student at the University of Warsaw. I completed my MA at the University of Łódź, where I developed a strong interest in postcolonial studies, analyzing Beyoncé’s artistry in my thesis as a tool for decolonization. In October, I began my PhD at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw, specializing in Culture and Religion Studies. My current research focuses on the role of music videos created by women artists in conservative, post-Soviet societies, exploring how these works challenge and dismantle the colonial legacy of the Soviet Union. My academic interests include postcolonial studies, gender, identity, cultural theory, and pop culture.

SESSION 13 (THEMATIC PANEL)   Infrastructures and Media in Baltic Musics 

This session uses alternative, innovative methodologies to explore relationships between Baltic musics and the infrastructures—both physical and digital—that shape music creation, dissemination, and documentation. Each paper presents a methodological or topical reorientation to recast the dynamics of music and place, both broadly defined, under conditions of transformation. Presenters will share diverse research approaches, including ethnographic studies, digital media analysis, and participatory practices that connect discourses in Baltic Music Studies to urgent contemporary debates. This interdisciplinary exploration will foster new perspectives on how cultural, social, and technological factors have long created diverse futures for Baltic musics.

Katherine Pukinskis
Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

Sidraba Birzs: The Impact of Place at the Latvian Song Festival

The location for some of the largest events in Latvia’s Song Celebration—the forested, open-air stage on the outskirts of Rīga in the Mežaparks—has been home to the Festival’s grandest choral concerts since it was purpose-built in 1955. In 2023, Latvia marked 150 years of their national song festival and debuted a new stage for the celebration’s largest performances, the Sidraba Birzs. Settled in the same location as the Soviet-built stage, the new structure responds to and respects the larger environment in which it sits. The architectural design is based on Latvian folk songs, folk tales, and the synergy between nature and humankind with the particular symbols as anchors. Where once the Soviet-designed stage interrupted its environmental surroundings, unaware of the larger context, this new stage is built into and because of its place. This research posits an analytical framework for music performed at the Latvian Song Festival which incorporates–and depends on–the place of performance as an integral aspect of meaning-making and impact. Since the celebration itself is, at once, an historical artifact and a dynamic marker of the present, as well as a consistent site of return in literal and figurative senses, the place of the stage in the Mežaparks takes on the role of what Martin Daughtry calls an acoustic palimpsest. While the remnants of the old stage have been removed, this place once held—and will always have once held—a residue of its past. Moving alongside the scholarly currents of Dylan Robinson’s modes of indigenous forms of listening, Ben Spatz’s work on embodied knowing, and Nina Eidsheim’s multi-sensory understanding of sound, this shifted research perspective offers the lens of place as an integral area of focus for understanding the Latvian Song Festival’s past and future.

Katherine Pukinskis is a composer-scholar whose work explores storytelling and voice. Dr. Pukinskis’s scholarly work centers cultural identity, diaspora, and choral music in Latvia, with secondary areas in contemporary American art song and musical theater analysis. She has presented her compositions and research across the United States and Europe. Pukinskis co-edited Baltic Musics Beyond the Post Soviet (Tartu, 2024), a collection of essays and conversations bringing together different generations of scholars and artists to continue along critical new paths in Baltic cultural studies from the position of sound and music. Pukinskis is an Assistant Professor of Music Composition and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University.

Anna B. Aldins
Yale University (USA)

Encoding Latvian Melodies: The Melngailis Collection and Patterns of Orality

In 1951, the composer, professor, and folklorist Emilis Melngailis published the first volume of his Latviešu Muzikas Folkloras Materiāli (Latvian Folkloric Music Materials), a compilation of tautas dziesma (folk song) melodies and variants from across Latvia. Although this first volume was printed well after he was named an “Honored Artist” of the Latvian SSR (Latvijas PSR tautas māklinieks), Melngailis completed the collection of the melodies in the work largely between 1922 and the late 1930s, in a free Latvia. 
Compared to many ethnographic projects of the period, Latviešu Muzikas Folkloras Materiāli incredibly records not only when and where Melngailis transcribed each melody, but who performed for him: his informants' names, ages, birthplaces, and sometimes even their manner of singing. In one case, on the 15th of July, 1929 in the area of Grenči, four-year-old Monika Buļs sang for Melngailis a melody taught by her ninety-year-old grandmother, “who did not want to sing” (Vol. II). In that moment, Melngailis not only wrote down a song; he also preserved how musical traditions are passed from one generation to the next.
The geographic and temporal contexts of the melodies in the Melngailis collection are invaluable to a modern-day understanding of the tautas dziesma tradition and how it developed before, after, and despite the occupations of the medieval, imperial, and Soviet periods. This paper will compare textual and melodic variants of the same tautas dziesma, here the well-known “Skaisti dzieda lakstīgala” (“Beautifully Sings the Nightingale”), in order to show that such variation is a product of the centuries of oral transmission – like that between Monika Buļs and her grandmother – that took place before the songs were written down by scholars like Melngailis.

Anna Baiba Aldins is a graduate student at the Yale University Department of Music, with interests in ancient music, the history of music theory, and computational musicology. Her research examines the musical connections between sections of the global ancient and medieval worlds, in part through algorithmic reconstruction of musical fragments. Anna was the recipient of Yale's Keggi-Berzins Fellowship for Baltic Studies in the summer of 2023, with which support she became a researcher at the Latvian National Library in Rīga during the 150th anniversary of the National Song Festival. Outside of her research, Anna is an active performer – she grew up singing with Boston’s Latvian community and has sung with the New York Latvian Concert Choir since early 2023.
 

Živilė Arnašiūtė
University of Chicago (Lithuania/USA)

Suppressed Voices, Renewed Stages: The Role of Soviet-Era Operas in Postcolonial Lithuania

How can an opera that glorifies Soviet ideals premiere during Lithuania’s growing momentum for change, while a work referencing partisan resistance remains sidelined for decades after the fall of the Soviet Union? The stories of Feliksas Bajoras’s Dievo avinėlis (The Lamb of God, written 1982, premiered 2022) and Algimantas Bražinskas’s Liepsna (The Flame, written and premiered 1987) shed light on this paradox and underscore the nuanced trajectory of art under (post)colonial cultural infrastructures. 
Dievo avinėlis focuses on a partisan’s fall and the surrounding spiritual and moral dilemmas, contributing to its censorship during Soviet rule. Its eventual staging in 2022 marks a renewed institutional focus on reclaiming repressed works and highlights the challenges of renegotiating national identity after decades of Soviet dominance. In contrast, Liepsna, which glorifies revolutionary communist ideals, aligned with Soviet ideological goals and premiered in 1987 despite an emerging national awakening. Bražinskas, although supported by Soviet institutions, held ambivalent views on the regime and oscillated between artistic freedom and conformity. However, Liepsna’s fading relevance after Lithuania’s reclaimed independence underscores the departure from Soviet cultural frameworks. 
The comparison of these operas reveals how Soviet cultural control and independence-era challenges influenced conceptions of national identity in Lithuanian opera. While Liepsna’s decline marks a departure from Soviet influence, Dievo avinėlis’s delayed premiere illustrates the complexities of cultural realignment, as institutions prioritized new directions over reviving suppressed works. This analysis informs reflections on postcolonial national identity and cultural legacies, illustrating both how Lithuanian composers navigated selective Soviet pressures while seeking artistic integrity, and how society now continues to engage with its once-silenced cultural inheritance.

Živilė Arnašiūtė is a PhD candidate in Music History at the University of Chicago, specializing in music and politics of the late Soviet Union. She examines the relationships between member republics and the Union, and the impact of transitions in the Baltics. Her contributions include a chapter on Lithuania's Singing Revolution and generational fissures in Baltic Musics Beyond the Post-Soviet, and a review in the Slavonic & East European Review. She has presented at international conferences, including the Conference on Baltic Studies in Europe and the American Musicological Society. Živilė holds a Master’s in Musicology from the University of Oxford, a Bachelor’s in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Foundation degree from City, University of London. She has lectured at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received grants from the American Musicological Society and the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies.

Jeffers Engelhardt
Amherst College (USA)

Estonian Podcasting as a Project of Applied Sovereignty in the Arts

Since the mid-2010s, a growing number of music- and arts-oriented podcasts have populated the media spaces of public-facing work in the Estonian arts and humanities. Among these podcasts are long-running series like Järjehoidja (since 2013, focused on classical and Estonian music); Luukamber (since 2017, focused on Estonian choral music), Päritud laul (since 2018, focused on traditional singing); Regilaulu Podcast (since 2020, focused on traditional singing); and Pärimuse podcast FOLKSTI (since 2022, focused on traditional music and singing). Shorter-term podcast projects include Kogutud muusika (since 2022, focused on music archives in Estonia) and Džäss on meie varjupaik (since 2023, focused on jazz in Estonia). 
The emergence and focus of podcasts like these articulate broad reorientations in Estonian media and institutions—reorientations that echo across media and academic spaces globally (audiobooks, public-facing work born on social media, and academic-adjacent or institutionally produced podcasts and vlogs, for example). This paper examines the podcasting turn in public-facing work in the Estonian arts and humanities through a network of impacts: 1) shifts in state funding toward applied projects and research; 2) the undiminished influence of established archives and institutions, reflected in an emphasis on traditional singing and traditional and classical musics; 3) the opening out of influence and authority to include both specialist and academic-adjacent voices; 4) shifts toward storytelling and accessibility in the creation of a public-facing digital archive; 5) the blurring of boundaries between broadcast and asynchronous media; and 6) cultivating an Estonian academic vernacular beyond the pressures of English-language publishing. Ultimately, the podcasting turn becomes one aspect of a project aspiring toward sovereignty in the Estonian arts and humanities.

Jeffers Engelhardt is the Karen and Brian Conway ’80, P’18 Presidential Teaching Professor of Music at Amherst College. He teaches courses in ethnomusicology focusing on community-based ethnography, music and religion, voice, and analytical approaches to music and sound. His research deals broadly with music, religion, European identity, and media. His books include Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia (Oxford, 2015) and Baltic Musics Beyond the Post-Soviet (Tartu, 2024). His current book project is Music and Religion (under contract with Oxford University Press) and he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion.
 

12 APRIL, SATURDAY

SESSION 14 (THEMATIC PANEL)  Postcoloniality in Lithuanian Performing Arts Discourse: 
From the Paradigm Shift to Transformations in Lithuanian Theatre and Opera Scenes      

This session offers an overview of the paradigm shifts, as well as postcolonial transformations in the Lithuanian performing arts discourse. Edvardas Šumila examines the changing socio-cultural conditions that emerged with the onset of neoliberalism prior to the 1990s, establishing a philosophical perspective on the question of postcoloniality in post-Soviet space. The papers by Vaidas Jauniškis and Rasa Murauskaitė-Juškienė analyse the postcolonial conditions of Lithuanian performing arts scene. Jauniškis raises the question of the impact of colonialism in Lithuanian theatre. Murauskaitė-Juškienė seeks to define the way in which postcoloniality can be discussed in the context of transformations of Lithuanian opera ecosystem.

Edvardas Šumila
The New School for Social Research/Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (Lithuania)

From commitment to neoliberal aesthetics: The dialectics of pre-1990s

As part of a broader project, this paper examines the historical conditions of the relationship between what is considered avant-garde and commitment in various art forms and aesthetics prior to the 1990s. While avant-garde movements on both sides of the Iron Curtain had an implicit positive teleology, which could be viewed through modernist discourses in both politics and aesthetics, the changing socio-cultural conditions with the onset of neoliberalism posed a challenge in terms of the social function of art, understood as immanent to the market. In this way, this paper establishes a philosophical perspective on these frameworks and their historicity, leading to a further examination of the paradigm shift after the 1990s, within both the rise of global markets and critical examination of the processes of decolonisation in the post-soviet space.

Edvardas Šumila is a PhD candidate in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. He established his interests mainly in critical theory, aesthetics and politics, artistic intersectionality, and political commitment with a particular focus on the thought of Theodor W. Adorno. Recently he has been working on the theories of Second Nature in relation to the theories of the environment, specifically the notion of “milieu”. He is one of the founders and curators of AHEAD, a festival for electronic sound practices (held 2013-2018), and has also curated and directed "Druskomanija" (2015-2018), Raseiniai (2018), and contributed to the programming of "Jauna muzika" contemporary music festivals (2016-2018), while also working as a curator at Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, and freelance curator for other events and exhibitions.

Vaidas Jauniškis
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (Lithuania)

Postcolonialism meets postmodernism: changes in theatre language

Language becomes very important in the theatre, when “identity is chosen along with language” (Simon During). The paper will look at the performances produced mainly in the first decade of independence through prism of post-colonial theories. The study examines the repertoire chosen by the theatres as a living and representative response to societal change. When Lithuania restored its independence in 1990, memory was one of the main themes for the society to (re)create a fragmented and shattered identity. Along with postcolonialism comes the time of postmodernism. Therefore, both the old Soviet narrative and the new, pan-patriotic narrative are deconstructed, and the theme of patricide is exploited. Irony, sarcasm, fragmentation, and intertextuality flourish on stage. From this perspective, metaphorical language that made Lithuanian theatre famous in the first decade of independence is linked to censorship and Aesopian language as a way of circumventing the regime. Why is this speech still used by young directors? The paper raises a question what kind of impact of colonialism is left and how do we deal with it now.

Vaidas Jauniškis is a theatre critic, columnist, lector in Lithuanian Music and Theatre academy in Vilnius, writes on performing arts and culture policy in Lithuania and abroad. 2005-2017 worked as project manager in Arts Printing House and edited website on performing arts www.menufaktura.lt. Member of Council for Culture in Lithuania (2013-2017; 2021-2025).

Rasa Murauskaitė-Juškienė
University of Cambridge/Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (Lithuania)

Postcoloniality in the Lithuanian opera scene. How can we define it?

Paraphrasing the title of Milan Kundera's famous novel, Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis described the state of the former Soviet states in the 21st century as 'the experience of the unbearable lightness of change'. Following the restoration of independence in 1990, this 'unbearable lightness of change' also became a permanent condition of the Lithuanian performing arts scene, which still has not been widely examined from postcolonial perspective. After the restoration of independence, and especially in the 21st century, Lithuanian opera scene became a platform for creative experimentation and a space for discussing sensitive sociopolitical issues. All of these experiences have been part of decolonisation, and contemporary operas, both sophisticated and open, reveal the complexity of these processes. This paper therefore seeks to define the ways in which the postcolonial condition has been manifested in the Lithuanian opera scene. The focus is on new operatic works by Lithuanian authors, created in the 21st century, dealing with complex issues of identity or human rights. The paper also analyses the institutional changes, the rise of NGOs as an important player in the field of opera development.

Rasa Murauskaitė-Juškienė is a music critic, senior editor of radio LRT KLASIKA, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her field of interest is contemporary Lithuanian music and the relationship of music to socio-political processes. Her dissertation explores the processes of decolonisation in Baltic and Ukrainian contemporary opera after 1991. Murauskaitė-Juškienė is the co-author of two books, and the author of over 500 texts and radio programmes on music and culture.

Separate report

Jānis Taurens
Art Academy of Latvia

“Sun Shines Where It Is Allowed; Sun Shines As It Is Allowed”: Art and Theoretical Reflection

The title of the paper is a paraphrase of the recent exhibition “Trees Grow Where They Are Allowed; Trees Grow as They Are Allowed” by Latvian conceptual artist Arturs Bērziņš. In the exhibition, we encounter tiny images in a hybrid technique combining appropriated historical drawings and photography, with three distinct motives: first, the typical Soviet-era buildings in today’s Olaine, a small town near Riga, mostly constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. The second element are stylised pictures of the sun from Soviet children’s books of the period (in some cases, by well-known artists), and the third element are drawings of trees in Soviet architectural designs. The methodology of the paper is based on a postcolonial reading of these structural elements, which reveals the visual-ideological meanings of the elements and their combinations. This reading will allow to highlight the “sunny” future as it is idealised for children in the often anthropomorphised image of a smiling sun. The graphic style of trees, i.e. the abstract form of staffage elements in the architectural designs, allow us to guess the connection between the Soviet vision of the future and the modernist ideals of architecture (using Madina Tlostanova’s thesis of the Soviet system as “failed modernity”). The two differently idealised forms future is a clue to the further analysis of the controversial assessment of Soviet modernism today. Moreover, a close reading of artworks by Arturs Bērziņš – in dialogue with similar motifs in works by artists such as Krišs Salmanis and Viktors Timofejevs (for example, in the exhibitions “Bitter”, 2023, and “Pedagogical Games 1. Agents and Boundaries”, 2024) – encourages a reconsideration of the debate on modernist architecture, focusing not on recognised architectural objects, but on typical buildings and everyday Soviet life.

Jānis Taurens (Dr. phil.) has significant experience in the interdisciplinary research using methods of linguistic philosophy and critical theories. His various publications and conference papers relate to urgent topics and problems in contemporary art, architecture, literature and philosophy. He holds the position of professor and heads the Faculty of Art History at Art Academy of Latvia. Recent publications (selection): Asja Lācis: a Room of One’s Own and Trajectories of Nonbelonging. In: Theory and Criticism of Literature and Arts, Vol. 5, No. 2, special issue 2021 Updating Herstories. London: Receptio Academic Press, 2021, pp. 27–45. Open Access Publication: https://www.receptioacademic.press/currentissue Postkoloniālais feminisms Ingas Gailes prozā: vardarbība un seksualitāte [Postcolonial Feminism in Inga Gaile’s Fiction: Violence and Sexuality]. In: Letonica, No. 45, 2022, pp. 8–27. Available: http://lulfmi.lv/LETONICA-Nr-45 Together with Jana Kukaine. A Smuggler, a Butcher and a Fairy: Doing Things with One’s Body. In: Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts. Ed. by Catherine Dormor and Basia Sliwinska. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, pp. 239–258.

SESSION 15   Fluctuating landmarks

Kristiāna Ābele
Art Academy of Latvia

Outdated Documents of the Age? Unaccomplished Soviet-Era Dissertations in Latvian Art History and their Role in the Continuity the Discipline

“Sooner or later, every work by an art historian becomes outdated and turns into a document of the the spirit of the age,” art historian Eduards Kļaviņš in 1998 used this statement for summing up a review of the multi-volume treatise “Latvijas māksla” (Art of Latvia, 1979–1993) by his exile colleague Jānis Siliņš (1896–1991). Behind the unpromising first impression this judgement implies a perspective of ageing with dignity – a prospect greatly reserved to published studies. But what about unpublished manuscripts and undefended dissertations? 
Since the 1960s the staff of the Department of Art History at the Latvian SSR State Academy of Art explored national subjects working on dissertations for the degree of candidate of science to be awarded by authorised institutions in Leningrad or Moscow. Minutes of the Department meetings record internal peer-reviewing panels of drafts at different stages. However, only some authors succeeded in obtaining the expected qualification. 
The paper aims to elucidate the fate of unaccomplished research projects with particular regard to the case of Genoveva Tidomane (1927–2006). Although “up to 1986 researchers in Latvia had not produced a general history of the art of the 1915–1940 period” (Kļaviņš, 2016) the manuscript of Tidomane’s dissertation on Latvian painting in the 1920s and 30s dates back to 1977. Even combined with a compulsory designator ‘realistic’, this period of the national independence was ‘uncomfortable heritage’ for the Soviet authorities and Tidomane ultimately failed to get her subject approved in the ‘high quarters’. The window-dressing for censorship was lack of qualified metropolitan experts for evaluation of her work. 
After 1991, the main new challenge was putting the art of Latvia into an international context, and Tidomane’s younger peers faced it with enthusiasm. Since the appearance of Siliņš’ comprehensive three-volume reference work on the art of 1914–1940 (1988–1993) locally produced unpublished studies from the recent Soviet past were often bound to oblivion in general and self-critical neglect by their authors in particular. However, these works deserve to be re-examined in order to identify their contribution to the continuity of art-historical scholarship in our country.

Kristiāna Ābele, PhD, is senior researcher and director at the Institute of Art History of the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga, lecturer at the Department of Art History at the same institution and member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Author of monographs about artists Pēteris Krastiņš (2006), Johann Walter (Walter-Kurau) (2009; concise version, 2014), Voldemārs Zeltiņš (2021) and Vilhelms Purvītis (in the book Purvītis, ed. by Laima Slava, 2022), parts about the artistic life of 1840–1890 and 1890–1915 in the Art History of Latvia (ed. by Eduards Kļaviņš, vol. IV, 2014; vol. III, book 2, 2019) as well as articles, conference papers, lectures, essays and exhibition projects about Baltic art in the late 19th and early 20th century. Her historiographical pursuits, however, link this period with the contemporary scene, inspiring to investigate the history of art history writing and education up to the 2020s.

Guntars Gritāns
Art Academy of Latvia

Variables in Postsoviet painters’ art after 1990

This study examines the transformation in Latvian painters’ work after 1990, combining critical art geography (Piotrowski) and postsocialist postcolonial theory (Ķencis) to understand the complex cultural dynamics of the post-Soviet period. 
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many artists and painters experienced a significant shift in their environment. Despite the many restrictions of the regime, many felt relatively secure about their existence and regularly received government commissions. Many artists, faced with the conditions of the free market, often encountered financial and emotional difficulties. This paper examines the works of artists and their lives whose artistic expressions have never focused on the themes established by socialist realism ideology (Biruta Delle, Imants Lancmanis, Anita Kreituse etc.) Continuing their professional activity in response to social and political changes, for many artists the previously important themes no longer seemed so after 1990. The parallel, "romanticized" world often referred to by some painters was a refuge for its essence during the Soviet period. As power and circumstances changed, often this vision of life and professional activity became no longer relevant. 
Polish art theorist Piotr Piotrowski (1952 – 2015) challenges the homogeneous treatment of postcommunist states in his work “Agoraphilia: Art and Democracy in post-communist Europe”.  As well as, he challenges the imperfect knowledge of Western scholars about this problem, which over time has given rise to these stereotypes, the unification of everything we call “post-communism”. Literary scholar Toms Ķencis (1980) in the journal “Letonica” (2021/1) uses the term post-socialist postcolonialism in his paper on developments in Latvia after 1990.
This research examines the creative activities of Latvian artists following the Soviet collapse, considering both the specific circumstances of post-Soviet Latvia and the relevance of postcolonial theory to this particular historical context. 
The artists’ negation in their memories and sometimes the glorification of the past era allows us to perceive this phenomenon as a very complex quantity. Interviews with practitioners confirm this multifaceted perspective. Touching and analysing the changes in the works of individual artists in this study, certain conclusions can be drawn regarding the transformations of their paintings, as well as the perception of the new era. The positive and the negative. Gains and losses.

Guntars Gritāns is a flutist and a lecturer at Riga Design and Art Secondary School and Emīls Dārziņš Music School, a guest lecturer at Latvian Art Academy and Business School "Turība"". His professional research focuses on the art and music of the late Soviet period in Latvia (the 1970s and 80s).

Sebastian Muehl
Art Academy of Latvia

An Elephant under the Microscope. The case of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA)

This presentation explores critical debates, issues and controversies instigated by the arrival of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA), in Riga. The first edition of RIBOCA was launched in 2018. From its beginnings, the biennial was met with suspicion and distrust, regardless of promises to engage with local institutions and to contribute to the dynamics of local art events. The criticism was mainly provoked by two reasons: First, out of fear that the global international event would undermine recognition and work of less-funded locally established initiatives, secondly due to intransparency of RIBOCA’s funding sources that supposedly were linked to businesses in Russia. Despite success and growing recognition of RIBOCA both in Riga and internationally, the biennial was cancelled in 2022 in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine, when its’ funding came under increased scrutiny and became subject of an investigative article by two Riga based art workers. 
The presentation will cast a closer look at the RIBOCA “case” and discourses surrounding the biennial, aiming to contribute to debates on socio political contexts, geopolitics, economies of art biennials, and most importantly, post-colonialism in post-communist societies. It will target two points. Firstly, it unfolds the conflict lines, power relations as well as the ideological, economic and cultural vectors in which RIBOCA was positioned. How precisely and for whom was it a Trojan horse of Russian influence, and did the intransparency of funding and capital flows compromise the overall event? In which way did the first large-scale biennial in Latvia expose shortcomings of the cultural funding situation in the country and issues of precarity and instability? Taking RIBOCA as a case study will help, secondly, to draw conclusions on art biennials as “contested infrastructures” between vulnerability and compromise in light of a transformed geopolitical reality – of war, democracies under pressure, and the re-emergence of imperial as well as de-colonial agendas. It is particularly interesting to frame RIBOCA within the geographical and historic positioning of Latvia on the eastern border of the EU, including its hoped-for role as a “mediator” and “meeting point,” and its post-socialist sensitivities and political exposure. 
Paper based on a joint research project together with Mara Traumane (Art Academy of Latvia).

Sebastian Mühl is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture (LMDA) of the Art Academy of Latvia and Research Assistant at ZHdK Zurich. He studied philosophy and fine arts in Munich and Leipzig and holds a PhD in art and media studies from Offenbach University of Art and Design. Sebastian was Digital Curator at the Dresden State Art Collections, where he launched the exhibition platform voices. His research focuses on political, ideological and aesthetic dimensions of global art and culture. His monograph Utopien der Gegenwartskunst. Geschichte und Kritik des utopischen Denkens in der Kunst nach 1989 was published in 2020.

Edgars Raginskis
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music

Cultural Politics and Musical Censorship: Examining the Case of Marta Spārniņa and the Decolonisation of Latvian Identity in the Arts

On 1 April 2023, following a fourteen-year tenure as the first concertmaster of the Riga-based Latvian chamber orchestra Sinfonietta Rīga, violinist Marta Spārniņa resigned from her position. This decision stemmed from a highly publicised and contentious disagreement between Spārniņa and the orchestra’s leadership regarding the ethical and political implications of performing Russian music in the context of the ongoing conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Her resignation constitutes one of the most pronounced manifestations of the increasingly polarised discourse on the decolonisation of Latvia’s cultural sphere from Soviet and Russian influences. 
This research critically examines the case of Marta Spārniņa to explore evolving attitudes towards Russian music, both historical and contemporary. It further investigates the rationale behind the partial exclusion of Russian music and artists from concert programmes and public spaces in the Baltic region, analyses the application of the principle that views the contemporary Russian music scene as a propaganda tool of the Russian Federation’s foreign policy, and examines the subsequent transformation of Latvia’s cultural landscape since the onset of the war in Ukraine. 
Keywords: censorship, Russian, Latvian, music, war, post-colonialism.

Edgars Raginskis is a Latvian composer, musicologist, and PhD candidate at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he researches musical censorship in the Latvian SSR’s Composers’ Union under the supervision of Professor Eugene Birman. His research interests also include transitional justice and post-colonialism, with a focus on how these themes intersect with music and cultural policy. Raginskis is an award-nominated composer with works spanning theatre, film, and orchestral music, recognised through multiple "Spēlmaņu nakts" award nominations. In addition to his studies, he serves as a research assistant and guest lecturer at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, contributing to academic research and teaching in the fields of musicology and culture journalism. He is also an active cultural journalist in Latvian media.

SESSION 16    The 1990s: jazz and curatorship

Indriķis Veitners
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music (Latvia)

The tradition of Latvian big bands and its importance in the development of Latvian jazz after 1991

In Latvia, big band has always been more than a simple jazz orchestra. A big reason could be the impact of two legendary jazz orchestras. REO (Riga Estrada Orchestra) and Latvian Radio Big Band (lead by legendary trumpet player G.Rozenbergs) were two of the most well-known Latvian jazz orchestras, whose professional and artistic level raised the reputation of Latvian jazz musicians in the Soviet Union from 1960s until 1990s. 
Unfortunately Latvian Radio Big Band was disbanded in 1995, resulting in a period of very little jazz orchestra activities. However, since 2010 big bands in Latvia are experiencing revival, counting more than 10 professional, semi-professional and amateur big bands. In 2012 Latvian Radio Big Band was also restored and immediatly got increasing international recognition. Jazz composition for big band is a mandatory subject of jazz studies in Latvian Academy of Music.
Interestingly, this phenomenon has not been observed in neighboring countries - Estonia and Lithuania, even though the Baltic States share close cultural and history links. The consistent big band tradition can only be seen in Latvia. 
The question has to be asked - to what extent has the fame and traditions of legendary orchestras in the past have influenced the modern big band movement in Latvia, and is it possible to talk about big band as part of today's Latvian jazz identity? How have the actions of previous orchestras affected the development of Latvia's growing big band movement, and does the next generation of musicians and audience identify with it?

Indriķis Veitners is Latvian jazz researcher and musician. Author of the book “Latvijas džeza vēsture 1922-1940” (“Latvian Jazz History, 1922 – 1940”, Musica Baltica, 2018). Contributed the article about Latvian jazz for the book “The History of European Jazz” (Equinox, 2018). Head of the Jazz Department at Latvian Music Academy (Professor), quest lecturer of jazz history in Viljandi Culture Academy, Estonia.

Heli Reimann
Tallinn University

The strategies of coping of Estonian jazz musicians in early 1990s

Singing revolution led to the restoration of Estonia’s independence and was followed by social change--the alteration of the social order including the changes in social institutions, behaviours and social relations. During the period of transition the society moved from state socialism to a society based on market economy. 
In musical field the orientation towards new mode of economy caused the collapse of previous state regulated structures and the decrease of state’s financial support. Also the regular job opportunities in restaurants and cafes vanished, and the access to Soviet stages was no longer available for Estonian musicians. 
Based on oral interviews with Estonian jazz musicians this presentation investigates the copying strategies of the musicians who faced the chaos of the early 1990s. This was the time when everyone fought for survival in the changing circumstances and where the new "rules of the game" must be learnt since the decay of the old structures and the opening of the society to the West.

Heli Reimann is an expert in jazz research with a focus on the Cold War/Soviet era and disciplinary intersections between musicology, historiography and cultural studies with 14 peer-reviewed individual articles and the monograph ‘Tallinn 67 jazz festival: Myths and Memories’ published in the Routledge Transnational Studies in Jazz series. Current proposal is base her recent project titled Music as asylum in the experience of Estonian jazz musicians Funded by Estonian Ministry of Culture.

Antra Priede
Art Academy of Latvia

Formation of curatorial discourse in the 20th century 90s in Latvia. The paradigm of exhibition histories

The role of the curator - and thus the curatorial practice and discourse - became relevant in Latvian contemporary art since the beginning of the 90s, when Latvia regained its second independence. Although more than 30 years have passed since the first attempts to articulate what it means to be a curator and what its practice is, it is still in its nascent phase and in the last five years this crucial process of the art environment ecosystem has been the focus of in-depth research. This report is a part of a wider research on this process of emergence, and it focuses especially on the 20th century 90s. 
The choice is determined by the identification of the discourse and the first conclusions about the available academic research sources in Latvian, which only in recent years acquire a legitimate status in the context of art history and theory. 
The limited volume of published literature specifically about the 20th century art phenomena of the 1990s in the creation and development contexts of contemporary art invites us to look at the parallels with other Eastern European art and culture development scenarios, in which the creation of Soros' contemporary art centers marked a significant role in the development of this ecosystem. The main sources of this report are the history and analysis of the exhibitions of the 90s; descriptions and mapping of the curator's strategies, which are analyzed with the help of the methodology of exhibition histories, looking directly at the exhibitions that took place on the territory of Latvia under the auspices of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), because the SCCA was an institutional mechanism of the post-socialist transition, and its main role was the modernization of the art discourse in the former socialist countries and republics of the former USSR.

Antra Priede  is an art historian and curator. Graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia (AAL) Art History and Theory Department, receiving a bachelor's and master's degree. Since her studies, AAL has also been her workplace – currently holding the position as Vice-rector for Academic Affairs and in 2018 she initiated and still manages the specialization of Art History and Theory Department – Curatorial Studies. Her research activities are related to reviewing of the history of exile and soviet period art, emphasising key contemporary issues, including the role of the curator in the local and international art ecosystem, the role of women in the art environment and other sometimes uncomfortable issues.

Maija Rudovska
Estonian Academy of Arts (Estonia)

Towards Artistic Autonomy: Curation in Late 1980s and Early 1990s Latvia

This paper examines the role of an artist as curator during the political, ideological, and institutional shift that occurred between the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Latvia transitioned from the late Soviet period to the restoration of its independent statehood. The author explores artistic contributions and art activism that were intertwined with the processes of the National Awakening in the late 1980s, and how these developments impacted the cultural scene in the 1990s, with reverberations even into the 21st century. The paper focuses on the formation of ideas, approaches, and myths that emerged within the constraints of the East-West discourse, leaving a significant imprint on the local art ecosystem, and argues that these elements should be analyzed from a decolonial perspective. 
The conventional way of looking at the aforementioned period is to divide it into "before and after 1989," treating the artistic processes as if they were separate, disconnected entities on either side of the Soviet Union's collapse. However, this view has been challenged in academic circles, which now advocate for examining this transitional or "in-between" period as a whole. That will also be a focus of this paper, posing a question: How we can look at the late Soviet period and the early 1990s as interconnected "system", where one thing informs the other, acting as a catalyst for twists, turns, and tensions, and shaping the cultural and artistic landscape for decades to come? The paper will propose several examples that could be seen as key case studies when writing Latvian art history from a postcolonial perspective.

Maija Rudovska is Riga based independent curator and art critic. Currently she is also a PhD student at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. She holds an MA in art history from the Art Academy of Latvia, Riga (2009) and has completed postgraduate studies in curating from Curatorlab in the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm (2010). Over the past fifteen years Rudovska has worked as an independent curator, art critic, cultural agent, art historian and educator. She has gained expertise and visibility in both regional (Baltic/Nordic) and international realms of contemporary art, and has worked with the Manifesta biennial (for the 13th edition in Marseille), the Foundation Ricard (both FR), Komplot, the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts (both BE), Futura (CZ), the Moderna Museet (SE), the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre (LV), Rupert, the Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius (both LT), the KUMU Art Museum (EE), the Living Art Museum (IS), HIAP (FI) among other art institutions across Europe and overseas.
 

SESSION 17   Rocking around

Wojciech M. Marchwica
Jagellonian University (Poland) 

Rock music in Poland in the 1980s - a harbinger of cultural changes after the fall of the Soviet system

The specific situation of Poland among the countries belonging to the Soviet system resulted in relatively greater freedom for composers and musicians working in our country since 1956. In the area of classical music, this is proven by the uniqueness of the Warsaw Autumn festival, but also by greater openness to absorbing Western pop music patterns. Of course, censorship significantly blocked entire spheres of cultural activity, but local centres or those associated with religious culture operated relatively freely already in the 1970s. Cardinal changes occurred after 1981, i.e. after the introduction of martial law in Poland. After a temporary freeze of all cultural activity, Polish society began to reject the imposed socialist ideology more and more boldly. Productions belonging to the so-called youth music were particularly important - many of them promoted ambiguous texts that escaped censorship regulations. Songs with the nature of generational manifestos also appeared (and gained wide popularity), such as "We want to be ourselves" [Chcemy być sobą] by the Perfect group, "Ask a policeman" [Spytaj policjanta] by the Dezerter group or Kora's hit "God’s Buenos" [Boskie Buenos]. Similar tendencies can be observed to an even greater extent in songs of the so-called underground circulation - e.g. The "Preyer" [Modlitwa] by Leszek Wójtowicz. The role these songs played cannot be overestimated in the process of changing the consciousness of Polish society during the collapse of the Soviet system.

Wojciech M. Marchwica, PhD, professor at Jagiellonian University, Deputy Director position in Fryderyk Chopin Institute (2011-2017). Research interessts include  the history of music in 18th c. and music within the cultural context. I’ve published numerous articles concerning Polish musical culture within the European one. Organiser and keynote speaker during the conferences: "Early Music – Context and Ideas" 1st (Kraków, 2003) and 2nd edition (Kraków, 2008) lately also "Music Across Media" (Warsaw 2017). Music editor ("Paderewski Opera Omnia", music of Polish baroque).

Andrievs Alksnis
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy if Music, Latvian National Museum of Literature and Music

Revitalization of Progressive Rock: Uģis Prauliņš and "Vecās Mājas" – Cultural Transition from the Late Soviet Era (1987–1994) and the Reunification (2023–present)

Since the late 1960s, under the repressive political system of the Soviet regime, where artistic expression was strictly monitored, academically trained Latvian composers and musicians often formed bands that focused on complex, technically skilled and intellectual rock music, a genre commonly referred to as “progressive rock”. Composer Uģis Prauliņš (b. 1957) has been captivated by the ideas inherent to this genre since the 1970s. He was a member of the progressive rock band “Salve” (1977–1979; 1986–1987) and subsequently, he founded his own band “Vecās Mājas” (1987–1994). 
“Vecās Mājas” drew inspiration from the most prominent examples of Western progressive rock from the 1970s, including bands like “ELP”, “King Crimson”, “Jethro Tull” and “Yes”. Notably, alongside their progressive rock repertoire, the band also performed acoustic folk music, utilizing traditional instruments in an extended lineup. Uģis Prauliņš has expressed his desire to offer shelter through his music – inviting listeners to delve into the meaning of the lyrics and the thoughts conveyed in the poetry of Latvia’s classical poets. The composer proposed and propagated the beauty of the native land, natural processes and landscapes, which were turned into technically sophisticated pieces. These works were not overt acts of protest, but rather an artfully disguised form of resistance that fused complex musical structures with intellectually engaging poetry. On September 30, 2023, “Vecās Mājas” released their first album on vinyl, featuring recordings from the years 1989 to 1992. In 2024, the band resumed regular performances in their main lineup after an almost 30–year hiatus. 
This presentation will introduce the key aspects of the band “Vecās Mājas” during the final years of the Soviet era and by studying the creative adaptations that emerged during the reconstruction and performance of their compositions three decades later. The aspects of the postcolonial culture situation will also be included in the report.

Andrievs Alksnis is a master's student of musicology at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music (JVLAM) and currently serves as a Research Assistant at the institution. His academic interests encompass the history of progressive rock in Latvia, as well as Latvian popular and rock music during the Soviet era. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in composition at JVLAM. Additionally, he works as an Expert of Art in the Department of Collection Research at the Latvian National Museum of Literature and Music (LNMLM) where he has contributed to the LNMLM conference "Akti. Fakti. Artefakti." in 2023 and in 2024.

Mārtiņš Mintaurs, Zane Grosa
National Library of Latvia

Popular Music and Politics in the Late Soviet Latvia (1970–1990)

The paper focuses on the distribution of popular music records imported (both legally and ilegally) from the West in the Latvian SSR during the 1970s and the 1980s. The subject in question here is related to several significant issues like (1) the circulation of the Western popular culture contents in the Soviet Latvia; (2) the Soviet policy towards spreading this information and values considered to be dangerous for the Soviet ideology. Authors of the paper will focus their research on particular distinctions in both aspects mentioned during two decades. In the 1970s illegal distribution of Western popular music recordings was considered a crime according to Soviet ideology in twofold ways: because of advertising values taken from the Western culture, and because of individuals gaining ‘illegal’ money for selling these records in private, for these activities were prohibited by Soviet law then. Situation began to change gradually during the 1980s as Soviet newspapers published short reviews of the Western popular music included in contents of disco evenings arranged by the Communist Youth organization. Another reason for letting in the Western pop-music on Soviet ground was linked to changes in the Soviet politics in general (perestroika and glasnost’) and the economy policy in particular, especially since 1987 when a semi-private trade was allowed in co-operative enterprises opening the door to distribution of the once forbidden magnetic records of the Western pop-music to be sold in a legal way. Considering the cultural as well as political and historical contexts in Latvia, annexed by the USSR relatively late (compared with other republics) and still holding a strong sentiment for the forms of non-Soviet existence, one can regard the situation in Latvia as an example of tensions between the Soviet colonial rule and quiet yet widespread form of opposition towards it expressed in terms of culture and leisure.

Mārtiņš Mintaurs, Dr. hist., senior researcher of the National Library of Latvia. Assistant professor of the University of Latvia since 2011. Scientific interests: intellectual and cultural history of Latvia in the 19th and 20th century, theory and practice of cultural heritage protection, history of cultural policy in the Latvian SSR (1945–1991). 

Zane Grosa, M. Mus., Head of Audiovisual Collection, Special Collections Department, National Library of Latvia. Master’s degree in music performance, as well as Information Management degree from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Victoria, Australia.Results of the academic research on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty digital audio collection were published in the Proceedings of the National Library of Latvia, 10 (XXX).