With only a few months to go before the EU eastern enlargement, a large Baltic-Finnish-Russian group exhibition that is financed 50 percent by the EU and will be shown until the day after the new states accede to the bloc (2 May) can certainly be seen in a geopolitical sense. After all, in the exhibition catalogue, a Finnish EU enlargement expert even reflects upon new and vanishing borders in the region. And many of the twenty artists featured in »Historia nopeammin« (»Faster than History«)1 deal explicitly with cultural sensitivities in the »not-yet-but-almost EU«, the »already EU« and the »probably-never EU« parts of north-eastern Europe.

Baltic questions

The thing that one notices first is that relatively few works by Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian artists and collectives address any aspects of the past going back further than 1991. So the formerly dominant Russian culture of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics remains – at least here in the selection made by the curator Jari-Pekka Vanhala – at most a marginal theme.

Three Baltic works can be said to attempt to come to terms with the past: in a video, the Estonian artists Mari Laanemets and Killu Sukmit take a close look at Georg Ots, an Estonian baritone who was popular in the Soviet Union and died the year the artists were born. Even though Ots praised his native Tallinn in the highest tones – at least in Russian -, the Estonians, according to Lannemets/Sukmit, did not go overboard with enthusiasm. Laura Stasiulyte, for her part, uses Soviet tourist slides of the Black sea, which the Lithuanian artist contrasts with video documents about »Nadesha« (»Hope«), a young Russian woman who places her hopes in attending Lithuanian and English language courses. A combination that, a priori at least, does not rule out a certain schadenfreude. In »Tallinn 89-99-02«, Mart Viljus contrasts a still-just-Soviet past with the Estonian present. His combination of black-and-white photos from 1989 and colour photos taken at the same location in 1999 and 2002 respectively makes the past seem greyer than is concretely suggested by the pictures themselves, which, for the most part, show only a few indications of any profound changes: a large portrait of Lenin with captions in Estonian and Russian (»Lenin’s ideas live and are victorious!«), which was replaced by an abstract pattern of lines that recalls Soviet aesthetics of the seventies; Estonian-Russian film posters for »Le Solitaire« (1987) with Jean-Paul Belmondo or »Les fugitifs« with Pierre Richar (1986), instead of which there are now advertisements for the Estonian action film »Agent Sinikael« or for »The Bourne Identity«. Or a rather dilapidated building (1989) whose place is now taken by a shopping mall.

In contrast to the Moscow artist Alexksandr Petljura, who, in his installation »Empire of Things«, shows an assortment of Soviet fashion from seven decades, thus highlighting a certain uniqueness of the Soviet experience, the Baltic works in the exhibition concentrate more on brave new consumer worlds and new forms of social and media expression than Soviet history. The artist Egle Rakauskaite from Vilnius portrays the largest market in her native city in her video »Gariunai«, while with his installation »TM« (»Trademark«), Mart Viljus swaps logos about to cause shopping confusion.

Herkki-Erich Merila and Arbo Tammiksaar focus on photography related to the national image: their photo series shows ten Estonians with a »heavy metal« bent, each holding at half-mast a sign with »Welcome to Estonia« on it. The Latvian collective F5 (Famous Five) exhibits an extremely kitsch, hi-gloss coffin, obviously designed for nouveaux riches, which also plays videos of flowers. And the Latvian action artist Gints Gabrans, obviously inspired partly by Andy Warhol, does not want to be like everyone else, but to be famous for more than 15 minutes. So, in the guise of his invented figure »Starix«, he lets no opportunity go by to get on Latvian television, whether as a demonstrator protesting against NATO and/or the EU, or as a participant on dating shows.

Finnish questions

As well as photographs by Tuuka Kaila, who portrays skaters from Helsinki, Moscow, Tallinn, Rovaniemi and other places using still lifes made up of objects belonging to each person, the works of two other Finnish artists can be seen in relation to Finnish-Soviet history. While Liisa Roberts, in her very nostalgic installation »What’s the time in Vyborg ?«, reflects on a city that was once of extreme cultural importance to Finland and went to the Soviet Union following the winter war of 1939/1940, in their film »Rajamailla« (»Borderland«), Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts allow inhabitants of the former Finnish province Karelia, a part of the Soviet Union from the 1940s and now in Russia, to talk about their experiences of the relative opening of borders: for example, about the »happy Finns« in Finland. Without my wanting to suggest any political intentions on the part of the artists, this last work in particular could be related to current revanchist tendencies in Finnish foreign policy, which have often been pointed out (by the Helsinki sociologist Johan Bäckman2, for example): although Finland was close »friends« with the Soviet Union since the 1940s, since the late eighties leading Finnish foreign affairs politicians have repeatedly brought up the »Karelian question«, which is to be discussed as soon as Russia is prepared to do so.

Russian questions

Even if Russia has, up to now, not seemed ready for such discussions, two works in particular can be seen as materialized »Western« expectations with regard to Russian art. On the one hand, there is a video installation by the Petersburg neo-Marxist Dmitri Vilenski, who examines souvenir photos in front of the Lenin mausoleum and homelessness in Moscow, but also shows Toni Negri footage from the European Social Forum in Paris, as well as handing out a left-wing newspaper – intended for artistic circles – with the appropriate headline »Sto delat’« (»What to do?«). On the other hand, there are photos and videos by the group »Sini nos« (»Blue Nose«), in which these Novosibirsk artists present vodka-happy idiots in all possible combinations. Something for which there has been a great demand in the »West« since the end of the Soviet Union. At the wish of the PR department of Kiasma, the »Blue Noses« are emblazoned on practically all printed material about the exhibition, with the exception of the catalogue (as was also the case with »Davai« in Vienna’s MAK). Shivering half-naked pictures in front of Orthodox churches were even made into a calendar.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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