Online Discussion
Art and Decolonial Solidarity: Ecocritical PerspectiveS
April 8, 5:00–6:45 p.m. EET
The discussion will be streamed live on Facebook
The recording of the conversation is available on VIMEO here
Participants: Äsel Kadyrkhanova, Darya Tsymbalyuk, Kristina Norman, Epp Annus, Heidi Ballet
Moderators: Ieva Astahovska and Margareta Tali
Our relationship with the environment is shaped both by current events and processes, and the past, the experience of specific places, and our interaction with global developments. Climate change and environmental crisis are direct manifestations of colonial exploitation of nature and the destruction of ecosystems in the past as well as today today. The decolonial perspective to these important changes urge us to critically reflect on and take action to free ourselves from the influences of the colonial past and its exploitative structures, systems, and the foundations rooted in its logic.
How can art and artistic research engage in addressing the climate change and environmental crisis, which are further exacerbated by wars, political upheavals, and the related ecological disasters? How can the more-than-human approach to the relationship between humans and the environment transform our perspective to the world? And how can we connect decolonial solidarity with the understandings about ecology and sustainability locally, regionally and globally?
In the second event in this online seminar series, participants from Ukraine, the Baltics, and Central Asia will discuss how artists and curators work with decoloniality and solidarity as tools for both thought and action, paying particular attention to connections, alliances, and parallels at the regional and global levels.
The online seminar series is a part of the project “Communicating Difficult Pasts”, which focuses on uneasy relations between past and present and their entangled nature in the 20th and 21st centuries This series is also part of the Lysiak-Rudnytsky Ukrainian Studies Programme held by the Ukrainian Institute and Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation with financial support of the International Renaissance Foundation, as well as the State Culture Capital Foundation in Latvia.
Recording of the first event of the online seminar series is available here.
ABSTRACTS AND PRESENTER BIOS
Äsel Kadyrkhanova
My presentation will address landscape in the post-colonial imaginary. Viewing landscape as both a culturally produced phenomenon and a lived space, I will reflect on the dynamics of ownership and belonging. Focusing on Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet republic with a complex colonial history, I will trace how ideas of peripherality, distance, and emptiness shaped Soviet spatial politics, which facilitated the famine in the 1930s, and later influenced the choice of the Semipalatinsk region as a nuclear testing site.
As part of my talk, I will show my hand-drawn animation film “Nükte” (9 min, 2026), currently on display at the exhibition “Between Fires: Irradiated Imaginations and Anti-Nuclear Solidarities” at “Framer Framed” exhibition space in Amsterdam. The film reflects on the post-nuclear time-space that emerged in Semipalatinsk as a result of nuclear testing that continued for forty years, from 1949 to 1989. The film explores the potential of visual language to touch upon something as spectral and haunting as radiation. I ask: What is the potential of audio-visual image in producing what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls counter-visuality? How can auto-ethnographic methodologies and family histories contribute to returning voices to the site of lived experience? And how embodied and situated knowledge generated by artistic research can be seen as a decolonial strategy?
Darya Tsymbalyuk
In her intervention, Darya will share stories from her book “Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia's War” (Polity 2025). In particular, she will focus on the steppes of her home region of the south of Ukraine, and plants that inhabit it, and which have been endangered by urban, industrial and agricultural Terraforming, and by the ongoing Russia's war on Ukraine. She will also reflect on the crime of ecocide, and visions of environmental justice which are imagined in Ukraine and across many other places under attack, as well as enacted on the ground.
Darya Tsymbalyuk is an interdisciplinary researcher, and her practice includes writing and image-making. Most of Darya’s work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. Darya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. She is the author of” Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War” (Polity, 2025). https://daryatsymbalyuk.com/
Kristina Norman
Kristina Norman's presentation introduces her artistic research project “Orchidelirium”, which explores the transnational lives of Andres and Emilie Saal – an Estonian couple who, around 1900, rose from a peasant family in the Russian Empire to become part of the Dutch colonial elite. The research focuses on the contradictions in their biographies and what they reveal about colonial power, identity, solidarity and its boundaries.
Andres Saal is known for historical novels that romanticize ancient Estonian resistance to German colonizers. After moving to Java, he wrote about Indonesian struggles against Dutch rule, yet later accepted a position within the Dutch colonial army. This change in social status enabled Emilie Saal to pursue a career as a botanical painter, a practice closely tied to colonial collecting and environmental extraction. By following their intertwined paths, the research reflects on Estonian self-identification as European and its connection to ideas of whiteness. Using an ecocritical perspective, the presentation highlights the lasting colonial and ecological implications of these biographies.
Against the backdrop of growing war anxiety and ongoing rapid militarization, artist and documentary filmmaker Kristina Norman explores in her work ways to create an ethical relationship with violence, both in the present and the past. Her most recent performance “The Dew Point” (2025/2026) poses the question of what our responsibility as a society is regarding wars we did not start but in which we have been involved in the past or are involved today. In many projects, Norman explores ways to highlight historical experiences that have remained in the shadow of dominant narratives and collections, and to make silent or silenced voices heard. Kristina Norman is a graduate of the Estonian Academy of Arts; she has represented Estonia at the Venice Biennale (2009, 2022), and her productions have been staged at numerous theater and performing arts festivals.
Epp Annus is associate professor at Tallinn University (Estonia); she also lectures at Ohio State University (USA). Her interests include Baltic cultures, postcolonial/ decolonial critique of Russian imperialism, interimperiality and extractivism, environmental thought and action, materiality and affect. Her recent books include “Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960-1990: An Intimate Cultural History” (Cambridge UP, 2025); “Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands” (Routledge, 2018) and “Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures under Soviet Rule” (ed. by Epp Annus; Routledge, 2018). She is also the author or co-author of three monographs and several collective volumes in Estonian. In addition to her work as a scholar, she has published two novels, some poetry and several children’s books. Her article “Inter-imperial invisibility and the logic of extractivism: Russian colonialism, its environmental cost, and federative futures in Ukraine and Estonia” has just been published open-access in “Canadian Slavonic Papers”.
Webpage: https://nyydiskultuur.artun.ee/en/people/epp-annus/
Heidi Ballet is a curator whose curatorial practice often engages with interdisciplinary questions at the intersection of art, science, and society. She has curated several public art projects, including “And So, Change Comes in Waves”, a permanent outdoor parcours commissioned by the University of Leuven in 2025 and the Beaufort Triennial, a triennial for public art along the Belgian coast, in which she commissioned outdoor works by Jeremy Deller, Rosa Barba, Goshka Macuga, Sammy Baloji and Nina Beier, among others. Previous curatorial projects include the 2019 Tallinn Photomonth Biennial, the 2017 Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) titled “I Taste The Future”, and the 2016 “Satellite” exhibition series “Our Ocean, Your Horizon” which was shown at Jeu de Paume in Paris and CAPC in Bordeaux. From 2012 to 2015, she worked as a research curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, where she contributed to the projects After Year Zero and Ape
Culture.
Margaret Tali is Assistant Professor in Cultural Theory at the School of Humanities in Tallinn University.
Ieva Astahovska is a researcher and curator who leads research projects on art during the socialist and postsocialist periods at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Publicity image:
Kristina Norman, still from “Thirst” (part of the “Orchidelirium” trilogy) (2022). The film links the colonial history of Phalaenopsis orchids with the colonial history of peat extraction in the Baltic states.