🎭 As part of the public program for the exhibition Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė, Zuzeum invites you to a lecture Curating Soviet-era art in the Baltics, by art researcher and exhibition curator Anu Allasas.
📅 Thursday, 27 March 2025, 6:00 PM
🎟️ Free admission with prior registration
🗣️ The lecture will take place in English
This talk looks at some challenges and possibilities of researching and exhibiting Soviet-era art in the Baltic countries based on three examples from the exhibition program of Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn: “Conflicts and Adaptations: Estonian Art of the Soviet Era” (open since 2016), “Thinking Pictures: Conceptual Art from Moscow and the Baltics” (2022) and “Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė” (since 2023 in Tallinn, Vilnius and Riga). Although the aims and focuses of these exhibitions were different, they all address the question of how to make art from the recent past understandable, relatable, and meaningful, especially as this past has been complex and difficult to process. Art is unavoidably a product of its context but has always also its own agency and active relationship with its surroundings. Curatorial practices enable to shape the narratives about the past both discursively and affectively. On the other hand, it has become evident in recent years how current political events can impact the understanding of history and remodel its representations.
About the lecturer
Anu Allas is the Vice Rector for Research and head of the MA program in museology at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture. She specializes in post-WWII Eastern European art, neo-avant-garde, and performative practices of the 1960s–70s. Allas earned her PhD from Berlin’s Freie University in 2013, focusing on experimental art practices in Estonian art and theatre during the 1960s.
She authored Spiel der Unsicherheit / Unsicherheit des Spiels (2015) and co-edited Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present (2018). From 2014–2020, she curated exhibitions at Kumu Art Museum. Currently, she teaches 20th-century art history and museology courses.
Her work bridges research, curation, and pedagogy, with a focus on Soviet-era art and its broader cultural contexts.
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