Unlearning Inherited Histories or Introducing Entangled Memories from the Baltics

Abstract

ABSTRACT This exhibition review discusses the past exhibition Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds (2022) at the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania. The project tried to shed light on the shared impact that long-silenced traumas and counter-memories have on the Baltic region, especially from a transnational perspective. A special focus lies on the oscillations between individual memory and public history as the exhibition participants engage in the creation of so-called ‘artistic historiographies’ based on unexplored and unknown memories by minorities and women. The displayed artworks are experimentally trying to provoke a process of ‘unlearning inherited histories’ by developing multifocal viewpoints and interpretations, an ongoing process the text accompanies. Navigating through the exhibitions’ conceptual threads, artistic manifestations, and ways of storytelling, the review introduces a generation of artists that is bonded to difficult and therefore challenging historical events from the 20th century, from the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine to the Dąbroszczacy soldiers and autofictional lesbian literature.