Like footnotes in a book, the footnotes translated in this symposium via exhibitions, discussions and performative events are kaleidoscopic but purposeful explanations of and additions to the main story of our recent past, dealing with various processes, artefacts, quotations, lifestyle details, mythology or nostalgia of the Soviet period.
It seems that enough time has finally passed to allow a more dispassionate view of the recent Soviet past. After all it is possible to look over the traumatic part of experience and, armed with irony and natural curiosity, start “excavations” in the Soviet time, revealing still present but partly covered, heterogeneous and multivalent discourses. It is especially important, considering that a new generation has grown up, knowing this period only from word of mouth, printed stuff or films.
Attempting to study the shared experience of post-socialist territories in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, one has to conclude that socialism as the dominant ideology of the time had different manifestations and faces in different countries. Is it possible to feel some common thread in this experience? In the post-Soviet context, it is normal to consider Baltic countries apart from Central Europe, Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asian regions. The project “Revisiting Footnotes” aims to widen the geography of the usual conversational field, including the above-mentioned regions, commonly viewed as different. New possible parallels and similarities in the interpretation of socialist experience today emerge through the kaleidoscope of thematically and geographically varied footnotes.
“Revisiting Footnotes I” introduce socialist and post-socialist heritage of the region through visual imprints and mutual relationships of their meanings, using different approaches – documentary, ironic, research-based, reconstructing and others.
Artists: Žilvinas Landzbergas, Marijan Crtalić, Lada Nakonechna, Arnis Balčus, Tigran Khachatryan, Slavs & Tatars
Slavs & Tatars. Triangulation, 2011
Žilvinas Landzbergas. Fast Forward, 2013
Žilvinas Landzbergas. Fast Forward, 2013
Arnis Balčus. Self-Portrait 1991–2013. 2013.
Lada Nakonechna. Before. Now. Further, 2009 –
Žilvinas Landzbergas. Fast Forward, 2013
Žilvinas Landzbergas. Fast Forward, 2013
Marijan Crtalić. Present moment of the history, 2012
Photographs by Inese Kalniņa
