Anapus meilės ir baimės : trauminio paveldo reprezentacijos dailės parodose
ENFamous for his interesting insights into the peculiarities of (former) Eastern European art, the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski has compared post-communist culture to a post-traumatic condition. A look at the processes of the memory of the soviet past that have been taking place during the last twenty years reveals that there is no shortage of trauma-publicizing or trauma-hiding practices. Do they yield the desired results? During the first decade, at least two types of occupation legacy were openly accessible in museums of soviet reality: resistance legacy (related to deportations, political annihilation and resistance to the regime) and official (art and culture objects embodying soviet ideology). The former is usually resorted to by a heroic narrative about communist crimes and victims, and about the liberation struggle. This narrative is represented by the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius and numerous smaller museums of similar type in all Lithuanian cities and towns. Conversely, the official legacy of the culture of the soviet period is not dispersed but concentrated in practically one location, in Grūtas Park. An impression arises that such established ways of exhibiting the traumatic legacy do not reveal the complex history of the soviet past, but merely express and consolidate the anti-soviet attitude. Several art exhibitions held this and last year dwelt, in one way or another, on the themes of history and memory, offering a fresher look at the legacy of the traumatic period.These were the exhibitions in Vilnius and Kaunas: “Monuments That Are Not: A Walk Around Vilnius” (National Art Gallery, curators Eglė Mikalajūnaitė, Rasa Antanavičiūtė, Živilė Etevičiūtė) and “Building a BrightTomorrow: Kaunas in Soviet Art” (Picture Gallery of the National M.K. Čiurlionis Art Museum, curator Edita Sedbaraitė), also, one of the most outstanding museum exhibitions of 2010 - “Woman'sTime. Sculpture and Cinema” (National Art Gallery, curators Elona Lubytė and Laima Kreivytė), and “Under the Red Star: Lithuanian Art 1940-1941” (Historical Presiden't Office of the Republic of Lithuania, curator Giedrė Jankevičiūtė). At first sight, these exhibitions are quite different. In the exhibition based on her academic research, Giedrė Jankevičiūtė aimed at showing the place and role of art during the first years of soviet occupation. The exposition of Elona Lubytė and Laima Kreivytė - an example of engaged curatorship - presented models of the depiction of woman that existed in soviet sculpture and cinema. The exposition of Eglė Mikalajūnaitė, Rasa Antanavičiūtė, and Živilė Etevičiūtė told the stories of the monuments designed, erected and demolished at six locations in Vilnius, which were closely linked to the facts of the city's occupation. Kaunas, as it was created in the works of the artists of the soviet period, was the focus of the exhibition curated by Edita Šedbaraitė. These exhibitions used immense amounts of artistic, documentary, textual and audio-visual material; quite a few works and documents were shown in public for the first time. Considering these exhibitions together, it wouldn't be too bold to claim that the art of the occupation period had not yet been presented and, what is more important, reflected upon on such a scale.The unifying feature of these exhibitions was that the works of art displayed were not closed, separated from the surroundings or, in Theodor Adorno's words, not hoarded in mausoleums. On the contrary, they were actively linked to a variety of contexts - ideological, political, social, and, finally, everyday contexts. What was shown at those exhibitions could be called visual documents of the epoch. “Monuments That Are Not” is probably t h e most analytical and almost an academic narrative based on cross-sections of cultural studies but not on political assessment. The analytical structure of two other exhibitions – “Woman's Time” and “Under the Red Star” - was supplemented by an evaluative approach, which in the case of the former was determined by feminist convictions, and in that of the latter by engaged political attitude to history. According to this classification, the exhibition “Building a Bright Tomorrow” shouId be called illustrative, because the curious documents of the past time displayed in it remained just documents, as the attitude to them was not presented. I think that such analytical, engaged, and evaluative variants of the interpretations of the traumatic past could offer the visitors to the expositions some transforming and change-inducing experience. Unlike the traumaphilic accusation or traumaphobic negation discussed at the beginning of this article. [From the publication]
