Symposium

Asja Mandić is a curator, researcher and art critic who works as Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Museum Studies at the University of Sarajevo. She completed her undergraduate and graduate education in Art History and Museum Studies in the United States of America and received a PhD from the University of Sarajevo (advisor Andrew McClellan, Tufts University, Medford/Boston). For seven years she worked as a curator of Ars Aevi Museum/Centre of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo. Over the years she has curated over twenty exhibitions, including the first pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Venice Biennale. She is the author of the book Challenges of Museum Education (Bosnian language) and six exhibition catalogues and is the co-editor of a catalogue/book Treasures of Socialism (with Michael Fehr) and the Journal of Museum Education (with Patrick Roberts). Her articles have been published in local and international catalogues, journals and books such as Third Text (2011), GTA Papers (2018) and Participation in Art and Architecture (2006). She was a Fulbright scholar at Tufts University, Boston in 2005/2006.  

Aslan Ġoisum lives and works in Grozny, Chechnya. He employs various artistic media—mainly the moving image, sculptural installation and paper-based techniques—that articulate the collective and individual upheaval marking the North Caucasus history. This inevitably entails analysis of the colonial legacy of the Russian Empire, in all its guises. His recent exhibitions include: Blood and Soil: Dark Arts for Dark Times, Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, 2019); Beautiful World, Where Are You?, 10th Liverpool Biennial (2018); How To Live Together, Kunsthalle Wien (2017) and People of No Consequence, Museum of Contemporary Art (Antwerp, 2016).

Assel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and PhD candidate at the University of Leeds. She works across painting, drawing, installation and moving image. Her doctoral research concerns cultural memory and trauma in post-Soviet societies, with a particular focus on Kazakhstan. She looks at art’s capacity to act as a medium of memory, questioning how art can help our understanding of complex interrelations of individual and collective memory and formations of cultural identity in post-traumatic and post-totalitarian societies.

Elina Niiranen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. She has studied Karelian folksongs and oral histories and made fieldwork in Russian Karelia and in Tanzania. Her studies are based on fieldwork among the Karelians and on archival materials collected during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Lately, Niiranen has focused on questions of identity and representations of Karelian culture in folksongs and narratives. Nowadays she is working with the project concerning the Finnish linguist Pertti Virtaranta’s field work in Soviet Karelia from 1960 to 1980. Her interests are dealing with the Karelian image in the linguist’s work and those conceptions used concerning Karelians.  

Elisabeth Kovtiak works as an independent researcher in Minsk, Belarus. Her academic interests include collective memory and its manifestations in art and public spaces (with a focus on museumising practices and flea markets). In her work, she mostly concentrates on transitional post-socialist societies. She worked as a researcher in projects on depression as a social phenomenon and civic activism in Belarus. She aims to introduce artistic and digital humanities approaches to her work to raise its impact, as she believes in the potential of creative dissemination practices. Elisabeth has obtained her MA in Culture, Media and Society at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Lancaster. Her MA dissertation was titled Beyond Post-Communist Nostalgia: Negotiating Personal and Collective Memory in Belarus. Before starting her career as a researcher, she worked as a columnist and journalist writing on culture and visual arts as well as a project manager at the National Centre of Contemporary Arts on a range of independent cultural initiatives.

Franziska Link studied Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Finnish Language and Culture and Slavic Studies at the Ludwig-Maxmilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, University of Helsinki (Finland) and State University in Saint Petersburg (Russia). Since 2018, she is a doctoral candidate at IDP Mimesis at LMU and currently works on her PhD thesis Drastic Voices in the Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. In addition to her academic work, she contributes regularly to the Yearbook of Finnish-German Literary Relations (Jahrbuch für Finnisch-Deutsche Literaturbeziehungen).

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė is a Senior Research Fellow at the Art History and Visual Culture Department of the Lithuanian Institute for Culture Research and she also teaches at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her current field of interest lies in the artistic culture of occupied countries, which she explores by focusing on the situation of Lithuania in the middle of the twentieth century. The results of her research are published in the form of academic papers and exhibition catalogues, for instance, the Chapter “Art as a Narrative of the Everyday Life in Lithuania During World War II” in The Art of Identity and Memory: Toward a Cultural History of the Two World Wars in Lithuania, edited by Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Rasa Žukienė for the series Lithuanian Studies (2016), and the catalogues Under the Red Star: Lithuanian Art in 1940–1941 (2011) and The Realities of Occupation: Posters in Lithuania during World War I and World War II (2014, with Laima Laučkaitė). Currently she is writing a monograph on Lithuanian art and artistic culture from 1939 to 1944 and curating the above-mentioned exhibition Difficult Age: Vilnius, 1939–1949.

Ieva Astahovska is an art scholar, critic and curator. She works at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, where she leads research projects related to art from the socialist and post-socialist period. Astahovska has compiled and edited a number of research-based publications: Valdis Āboliņš: The Avant-garde, Mailart, the New Left and Cultural Relations during the Cold War (2019), Workshop of Restoration of Unfelt Feelings: Juris Boiko and Hardijs Lediņš (2016), Revisiting Footnotes: Footprints of the Recent Past in the Post-Socialist Region (2015) and Recuperating the Invisible Past (2012). Her curatorial projects include the exhibitions Valdis Āboliņš or How Fluxus Came to Aachen at the Ludwig Forum, Aachen (2018), Archaeology of Kinetics at Riga Art Space (2016), Visionary Structures: Form Johansons to Johansons at Bozar, Brussels (2015) and the Latvian National Library in Riga (2014), Berlin–Riga: Scores for Indeterminate Places (2013) and Parallel Chronologies: Invisible History of Exhibitions in Riga (2011).

Jaana Kokko is a Helsinki-based visual artist with a background in arts and economics. She works primarily with video, but also in the fields of photography, text and drawing. Her works revolve around the subjects of language, representation and alienation with the eye of a feminist. In her practice Kokko is often interested in “polylogs”, showing through dialogue how our world consists of different individuals and their interpretations of reality in their historical context. Since 2011 Kokko has been working on her practice-based dissertation in political and social arts and is particularly inspired by Hannah Arendt. She has lectured at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in the program Time and Space since 2016.

Jan Matonoha (M.Phil., 2006, UK; PhD, 2008, Charles University, Prague) was a Newton Fellow in the UK in 2012–13. He has published a number of articles and two books in Czech by Academia (the publishing house of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague), and has contributed to several others, including Expropriated Voice: The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism, edited by Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová (Routledge, 2014). For about six years, he was a member of the editorial board of the bimonthly Česká literatura (Journal for Czech Literature). His research interests are the theory of literature, twentieth-century Czech literature, feminism and gender studies in literature and (non-human) animal studies in literature. Currently he is a member of the network COST (NEP4DISSENT) and INTER-COST, administered by the European Commission of the EU. 

Jan Miklas-Frankowski is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Media, Journalism and Communication in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Gdansk. His main area of research includes contemporary Polish reportage with a particular focus on Polish-Jewish relations and Jewish issues as well as the work of Czeslaw Milosz. He is a founding member of the International Association for Holocaust Studies and a member of the International Association for Literary Journalism and the Memory Studies Association.

Kai Ziegner is an artist and educator, born in Plauen, GDR. He studied German Philology, Journalism and Political Science in Leipzig, Photography in Berlin and Fine Arts in Zurich. He holds a master’s degree awarded by Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and is currently a PhD candidate in artistic research as part of the PhD cooperation program of Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK/CH) and the Linz University of Art and Design. Ziegner has worked as a journalist, filmmaker, author and photographer and is currently teaching artistic research strategies at Zurich University of the Arts and has taught before in Germany at the University of Potsdam. He is a member of the artistic research group founded in 2012 at ZHdK by Professor Giaco Schiesser. Ziegner’s works have been shown in several international solo and group exhibitions and published in different magazines and anthologies, including Ojo de Pez/Madrid, Sekai/Tokyo, Jovis Publishers/Berlin. The main focus of Ziegner’s artistic research is the experience of structural violence in private and public space, on the onset and aftermath of social change in East Germany and on the experimental rethinking of history as an artistic research strategy. He is also interested in further development of artistic teaching methods for Bachelor, Master and Doctoral level education. He lives in Berlin with his wife and twin sons.

Kati Roover is multidisciplinary artist living and working in Helsinki. She approaches environmental changes through poetic imagination, creating works that combine her research with a broad range of perspectives; for example, human-non-human interaction, natural sciences, ecological and decolonial thinking, mythical storytelling, feminist new materialisms, elemental cinema and documentary essay film. She works with moving image, sound, photography, text and installations. Roover received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts (University of the Arts Helsinki) in 2016. www.katiroover.com 

Katrina (Kat) Black is a writer, researcher and program curator based in London, and part of Jupiter Woods, an organisation and platform for interdisciplinary research and practice. She recently completed her MRes (with Distinction) in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University, with a specialism in Art History. Her research focused on silences and omission as structuring principles in the work of filmmaker and writer Chantal Akerman and the poet and writer Rosmarie Waldrop, and considered how movements between such absences might be utilised as feminist tools for exploring subjectivity. Her forthcoming work includes: a screening and conversation at the ICA London titled Feminist Films on Work & Protest, organised in collaboration with the feminist film journal Another Gaze and followed by a conversation with historian and theorist of radical psychiatry Hannah Proctor and filmmaker and performance artist Michelle Williams Gamaker; an essay for Another Gaze on desire in the work of Marguerite Duras and her film India Song (1975); and a commissioned essay for South London Gallery and Film & Video Umbrella, for the solo exhibition of filmmaker Sophie Cundale, in March 2020.

Lia Dostlieva is an artist, cultural anthropologist and essayist from Ukraine, currently based in Poznań, Poland. She has a degree in Cultural Anthropology. The primary areas of her research are trauma, postmemory and agency of vulnerable groups. She works in a wide range of media, including photography, installations and textile sculptures, and has exhibited her works in Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Austria and elsewhere. 

Margaret Tali is Mobilitas Plus Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She completed her doctoral studies at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, after which she taught Cultural Theory and Art History at the University of Groningen and Maastricht University. She’s the author of Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums (2018) and co-editor of Archives and Disobedience: Changing Tactics of Visual Culture in Eastern Europe (2016). Her current research deals with the complex memories of the Second World War in the Baltic States by focusing on practices of contemporary art and documentary film. 

Maayan Raveh is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a fellow of the PhD Honors Program at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for The Advancement of Peace. Maayan has a BA in Arabic Literature and an MA in Religious Studies, both from the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on Christian theology in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and on the tension between theology and politics. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Maayan is also an active member of several interreligious dialogue and peace organisations in Jerusalem.

Mischa Twitchin is a Lecturer in the Theatre and Performance Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Amongst his research interests, he is a member of the Memory Studies Association Arts Research Group. His book, The Theatre of Death—the Uncanny in Mimesis: Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg and an Iconology of the Actor is published by Palgrave Macmillan in their Performance Philosophy series, and examples of his performance- and essay-films can be seen on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/user13124826/videos.

Paulina Pukytė is a Lithuanian artist, writer and curator based in London. She writes critical and satirical articles on art and cultural issues, as well as experimental literature, poetry and plays. She makes site-specific interventions, still and moving image and conceptual projects using found artefacts, often employing coincidence and chance. She is also involved in the discourse of public space and commemoration and in 2017 curated the 11th Kaunas Biennial There And Not There: The (Im)Possibility Of A Monument.

Rasa Goštautaitė is a PhD student at the Faculty of History at Vilnius University, Lithuania. She currently works on a dissertation titled Contested Heritage and its Role in Cultural Heritage Politics in Post-Communist States. Her PhD thesis addresses issues of contested Soviet heritage in Lithuania, situated in a wider context of post-communist and post-Soviet Eastern Europe. It is interdisciplinary research, interweaving heritage and memory studies, history and anthropology. Rasa has previously completed her MA in International Cultural Heritage Management at Durham University (where she graduated with First Class Honours) and holds a BA in History and Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London (where she graduated with Distinction).  

Shelley Hornstein is Professor of Architectural History & Visual Culture at York University. Themes she explores are located at the intersection of memory and place in architectural and urban sites, cosmopolitanism, nationhood and how architectural photography structures a conversation about place, citizenship and human rights. She is currently writing a book entitled Site-Seeing: Monumental Itineraries and Architectural Tourism, as an investigation of how architecture is the key to tourism through tangible and intangible places. Hornstein is the recipient of the Walter L. Gordon Fellowship, Canadian and International research awards and is on the advisory boards for several academic journals. She holds the inaugural eLearning Award for the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, York University, 2014. Her most recent book, Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place, was published by Ashgate in 2011. Her other books include: Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (McGill-Queens University Press, 2000), Image and Remembrance: Representation and The Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2002) and Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (NYU Press, 2003). A graduate of the Université de Strasbourg (Marc Bloch), France, Professor Hornstein has taught at York University since 1985. Her courses include Memory and Place, Cultural Cartographies, Paris as Modernist Dream, The Celluloid City, No Place like Home and The Metropolis Revisited. 

Zuzanna Hertzberg is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and researcher. Her practice includes painting, performance, textiles and assemblage. She is the author of installations and collages using archival materials. She is interested in the seepages of individual and collective memory, and in the search for identity in the mechanism of appropriation and reclamation of minority heritage, especially women’s heritage, as well as issues of geopolitics and strategies of marginalisation of uncomfortable narratives. She earned her PhD at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (Spaces of Ignorance, 2018). She has participated in a number of exhibitions in Poland and abroad, is the co-founder of the Jewish Antifascist Block, a member of the Antifascist Coalition, and a member of the board of the Association of the Jewish Historical Society.

Eneken Laanes is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Culture Analysis at Tallinn University and Project Leader of the ERC project Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena. Her research deals with transnational memory and transcultural memorial forms in post-Soviet memory cultures of Eastern Europe. Laanes studied comparative literature at the University of Tartu, University of Bologna (Spring 2001) and the Free University of Berlin (2003–4). She has been a Juris Padegs Research Fellow at Yale University (2013–14) and a Kone Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium (autumn 2019). She is the author of Unresolved Dialogues: Subjectivity and Memory in Post-Soviet Estonian Novel (in Estonian, Tallinn: UTKK, 2009) and co-editor of Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia (Helsinki: SKS, 2015).

Ilya Lensky graduated from the History and Philosophy Department of the University of Latvia, specialising in Modern and Contemporary History. Since 2006 he has worked at the Museum Jews in Latvia; as director from 2008. His field of interest includes Latvia’s Jewish history with emphasis on Enlightenment, modernisation of the Jewish community and Jewish-Latvian relations, as well as issues of Holocaust commemoration.

Siobhan Kattago is a Senior Research Fellow in Practical Philosophy at the University of Tartu in Estonia. She received her PhD from the New School for Social Research in New York and is a contributor to its blog, Public Seminar. Her academic interests include collective memory, the philosophy of history, political and social philosophy and twentieth-century European history. Much of her research addresses the work of post-war philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Reinhart Koselleck, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. Her publications include: Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time (2020), The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies (editor, 2015), Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe: The Persistence of the Past (2012) and Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (2001).

Violeta Davoliūtė is Professor at Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science and Senior Researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. Recently, she was a Fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (2018–2019) and Associate Research Scholar at Yale (2015–2016). Violeta Davoliūtė completed her PhD at the University of Toronto and is the author of The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War (2013). A specialist in matters of historical trauma, the politics of memory and national identity, she has co-edited three volumes and has published numerous articles in journals like Ab Imperio, Osteuropa, Ethnologie Française, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (the Journal of Baltic Studies) and others.