Vilnius Gallery Weekend. Interview with Ieva Epnere and Kristaps Epners

On the eve of Vilnius Gallery Weekend, we met with two Latvian artists, Ieva Epnere and Kristaps Epners, for a chat. Sitting against the backdrop of a half-installed exhibition on Vilnius street, we talked about the artists’ works, the Baltic art scene, and the importance of culture in times of crisis.

Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė (AMS): I’d like to start our conversation with the main keywords of Vilnius gallery weekend’s curated programme – liminality, uncertainty and transition. This “being in between” describes the human condition in itself and is relevant to every particle that exists in the world as we know it. The art world seems to really enjoy this word, and I’m curious, how relevant is this theme to both of you?

Kristaps Epners (KE): The starting point for my work was the discovery of the uprising in the Steplag (location Kengir) Gulag camp one year after Stalin’s death. It was a huge camp for political prisoners in the area, which is now Kazakhstan. Only 70 years have passed since that moment. The prisoners were hoping to be released from the camp, or at least get better living conditions, but nothing like this happened. Thinking about Russia’s war in Ukraine and these prisoner camps, we can see that history is repeating itself, and we’re learning nothing from it.

I was lucky enough to find documentation of classified correspondence between various officials – representatives of the GULAG system, who reported to each other about the prisoner uprising and discussed ways to stop this disobedience. That exact camp held around 6,000 people, most of whom were Ukrainians, but also Lithuanians, Russians, and Latvians, in total – more than 33 nationalities. There was this one moment where they’re writing to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union in Moscow, that four swans landed in the Gulag, and one of the prisoners caught the swan and attached a note to its leg, released the swan to fly, hoping that someone would read it. But the prison was surrounded by a desert-like steppe with no one to read this note, yet they still had hope that someone would receive it. Another thing they were doing, which I interpreted in my installation, was releasing kites made from cigarette papers, and the guards were catching them with their own kites. You can draw a parallel between the drone war and what they’re doing with the optical cables — the technology is different, but the hopeful gestures are similar.

Ieva Epnere (IE): I’m showing two works, one is two years old, called Laidi, which is a place in the Courland region of Latvia, not that far from the Lithuanian border. This work touches on a problem, which you may also face in Lithuania, that the countryside and smaller towns are emptying, not so many young people are choosing to stay, so school consolidation is happening. In Latvia, it is happening drastically; lots of schools are closing down, and if you close a school, then the village freezes in a way, because the school is a centre of exchange of information, a place for kids to socialise, even to spend their free time when their parents are working, it is the heart of a village.

I was invited to Laidi for a residency for two weeks. The residency project is curated by Maija Rudovska. She invites artists to different small towns in that particular part of Latvia to develop their artistic practice, and it happened that I landed in the school. And from my window, I could see the daily rituals of the kids arriving and leaving school. I found out that the school has a theatre as an after-school activity, and the school had only 42 kids at that time, and almost half of them were attending the theatre class. I wanted to do something together, and things developed quite fast. A year after I finished my residency, I found out that the school was closing down.

Due to this, my idea, which I was working on during the residency, changed entirely. I decided to document the last half of the school year before it’s closure after 101 years of it’s existence. We, together with cameraman Valdis Celmiņš, filmed for several months.

Actually, this problem worries me a lot because I understand how important it is for the community to have a school in the town. And to answer your question about how our work is connected with the Vilnius Gallery Weekend theme, “liminality”, it’s this forced emptying that’s happening. The future doesn’t look so bright.

AMS: The first half of the film Laidi absorbs you into the rhythm, a repetition of the primary school activities, that gives a sense of calm, order, but also playfulness and hope. And then the serene feeling evaporates with the frame with the fire, the books burning, their burning pages blown away by the wind, and the taxidermy bird melting into flames. And even though the cycle continues after this frame, you’re left with the uncertain feeling, the discomfort of memories being burned. Could you tell more about the film? Why was it important to you to document the school?

IE: I’m a teacher myself. I’ve been teaching in an art school for 10 years, so pedagogy and the work with children are kind of already in my DNA. So when I read the news about schools shutting down, it disturbed me a lot, because I know what it means when your education process is interrupted and you have to change your environment, adaptation process for a new place. The same feeling encouraged me to film the school in Laidi, to show the rhythm of daily life in a small village school, along with this community feeling and how important it is to try and save schools.

AMS: At the very end of the film, you show the older generation. Who are they?

IE: Yes, it’s not only that I directed a film, but I, in a way, directed the school closing event too. When we found out that school was about to close, during the pandemic, it was the year of the 100th anniversary, but the event didn’t happen. And then I convinced the school’s director, let’s not do a “funeral”, let’s organise a festival. I invited the choreographer Elīna Gediņa, and we created this play, based on the legends, which I collected about that particular place. The director invited the school’s alumni, and more than 300 people came. So it was really, really nice.

AMS: In another video, called Encounter, the main focus also goes to a building. The gaze starts from the close-up of the inner courtyard, slowly ascends, and comes back to the concrete. Could you tell us more about the video works, Kristaps?

KE: It was a very interesting “collection” of people in this camp: people with a higher education, ex-commanders, scientists, and engineers – very dangerous people for the Soviet Union. And then, with the aim of breaking up the rebellion, real criminals were also introduced among them – murderers, rapists, and recidivists. And somehow, they worked together, and the uprising lasted 40 days. It was the longest uprising in the Gulag’s history, known as the Kengir Uprising.

Birds were used as messengers as well. Moreover, one Japanese prisoner constructed a kite with a mechanism to lift a small box to launch messages into the wind. The video responds to this. The building, a former KGB interrogation site with a prison, popularly known as the Corner House, is now almost abandoned, with only a KGB museum on the ground floor.

I met the man who was in this camp; he was one of the youngest boys there, 16 or so. He was interrogated in this house. So the gaze in the video comes up and then comes down in a loop without ending.

For this show in Vilnius, I’m adding a video with censored text from communication between camp guards and the Moscow office of the Gulag, the minister and other big bosses, negotiating about what to do with the people. For 40 days of the uprising, they had their own kind of government and police, orderkeepers, because the camp was huge.

I’m using documents from archives, which are not accessible anymore, because of the war. When you listen, it’s easy to understand that they’re lying or not telling the whole truth, even in these documents, because they are scared. The gulag system understood that time was changing, and they would be persecuted, because they acted like animals. Their reaction was to provoke prisoners and to show that they are not reliable and need stronger discipline.

And now we live in dystopian times, when we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. For some time, I was unable to make new work because I felt there was no purpose in creating in this situation. I cannot imagine how Ukrainians feel when 800 bombs are falling on their heads every day. When I was in a group show at Stasys Museum, I spoke with several Ukrainian artists about how they can keep making art during the invasion, and they said that’s what’s keeping them sane.

And sometimes I ask myself, what are we doing? Art is useless. There’s no space for it anymore; we’re playing with toys without purpose.

AMS: And how do you come out of this feeling?

KE: I’m not really out, but I’m trying. I’m grateful when opportunities arise.

Now, together with Ieva, we’re working on a project researching the eastern part of the border of Western civilisation, and questioning what the “West” really is.

AMS: To be straightforward, do you think that art can make actual change?

IE: It can leave things better than worse. With art, you can somehow keep space for humanity, but I doubt it can change society – people don’t learn from much more serious things. Still, if you do it honestly and talk about what’s important to you, it can reach people.

AMS: Lithuania’s government is putting a lot of money into national defence, and there’s less and less money left for culture.

KE: We’re in a similar situation; the budget for the culture capital fund will be frozen for at least three years. And if you count inflation, then it’s losing money.

IE: But if you look, what is the thing which the enemies are targeting first? It’s the culture and language. Now, Russia is trying to destroy any evidence of the Ukrainian culture by bombing museums and churches.

And even if we look at the pandemic times, when everything was shut down, people understood how much they missed museums and theatres; it awakened the hunger for culture, and online exhibitions emerged.

AMS: To return to the space that we’re in now, how was the installation process? How did you choose this specific location?

KE: I entered the room and said it was mine. I chose it because I saw a possibility to deconstruct something in space. I also saw the connections between the room and the story in my video work, some kind of evidence of the past.

IE: I saw the space that we’re in as a middle between something old and new. Similar to Laidi, the old school is now being turned into an artist residency. And our works, mine and Kristaps, just coexist here, and the installation is led by intuition. The invitation to participate in the show came at the right time, and we landed in the right space.

AMS: Could you say a few words about your new work, I wish I could tell you / I wish you could tell me?

IE: If you repeat the title several times, you lose the understanding of whether it’s about you or somebody else. It’s also a fragment of a conversation between me and my father, who passed away exactly one year ago, last September. Through this work, I continue the conversation which was interrupted by his death. This work was created in my father’s apartment. And in a way, this apartment, which holds a lot of memories from my childhood, became my studio. This work is something new for my practice, as I also appear in the photographs for the first time. I was experimenting with combining new materials, there is also a moment of repetition and it includes many visible and invisible layers. Earlier on in my practice, I had been printing photographs on different fabrics, too, but this time, some photographs became sculptural.

AMS: And how do you feel here in Vilnius?

KE: We’re a bit jealous of Lithuanians; we have a feeling that Lithuanians are one step ahead of Latvians in many different ways. You have a contemporary art museum, which we still don’t have, and this Vilnius gallery weekend also works as a satellite.

IE: Every time we come to Vilnius, it lifts us. We feel that things that are happening here are freer, diverse and full of surprises.

Project is funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality