A Baltic round up.

4TH ARS BALTICA TRIENNIAL FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC ART

STADTGALERIE

KIEL, GERMANY

MARCH 31-MAY 28, 2007

CROSSKICK: RIGA REVIEW

NEUE GESELLSCHAFT FUR BILDENDE KUNST

BERLIN

MARCH 10-APRIL 22, 2007

ARTHUR KLINAU: ALICE IN WONDERLAND

GALERIE GIEDRE BARTELT

BERLIN

MARCH 15-MAY 19, 2007

Sometimes art imitates life, and sometimes art anticipates it. This year's Ars Baltica Triennial for Photographic Art is a case in point. This triennial, now in its fourth incarnation, is an interface for photographic and video arts in the countries that touch upon the Baltic Sea. This event is especially important for the three smallest nations in the region, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the so-called "captive nations" of the cold war era, which are now undergoing massive change in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and accession to the European Union (EU).

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After looking at a series of small but interesting photography-related shows in Berlin at Galerie Giedre Bartelt and the Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst (NGBK), I viewed Ars Baltica in Kiel, Germany, and visited Tallinn, Estonia, several months in advance of the show's opening there. As I arrived in Tallinn, the city was in the midst of major riots occasioned by the removal by Estonian authorities of the memorial to the Soviet soldiers who died fighting Nazi Germany in World War II. As such, this turmoil goes to the heart of the matter of Ars Baltica, which functions as a forum. Every three years, it brings a themed exhibition addressing some aspect that affects the region. Typically the principle concerns have worked around ethnicity, identity, and transformation, dealing with the burdens of history, evolving democracy, and transformation from Sovietera economies to market capitalism. This year's ill-named festival, "Don't Worry Be--Curious!," does the same and follows up on the previous year's show, "What Is Important?" In general, the show revolves around youth culture, regionalism versus globalism, and nationalism and ethnicity.

This year two bodies of work hit the theme head on: Anu Pennanen's video Friendship (2006), also known as the Tallinn Project, and Arturas Valiauga's photo installation "Between the Shores" (2007). During the Tallinn Project, which was filmed over the course of a year, Pennanen, a Finnish artist, followed youth around the malls and parks of Tallinn as they interacted in groups and discussed Russian-Estonian relations in post-Soviet Estonia where the population is more than 25 percent Russian (almost 50 percent in Tallinn itself). The video, though reenacted, is unscripted and extraordinarily prescient. Obviously, the troubles that boiled over in Tallinn have been simmering for ages, but Pennanen's work is a remarkable document. "Between the Shores" addresses communication on a basic level with the commercial ferry shuttling between countries. The ferry, which was photographed at night in its own pool of light, symbolizes a ship of fools and serves as a microcosm of society. A third piece, A Walk in Lusatia (June 12-17, 2006) by Sven Johne, explores the return of land to nature, which is occurring because of the abandonment of large areas of eastern Germany due to lack of employment. With his camera, Johne traced the return of the first wolf packs from the Polish border to the German side. It is eerily photographed with night vision equipment and metaphorically marks another side of the displacement wrought by economic transformation and EU expansion.

While this year's festival concentrated on the more overt levels of identity politics, other works from Norway and Denmark addressed issues of assimilation in society and youth culture in the countryside in the form of a music festival in Ringenes, a village in southern Norway. Installation art and soundbites matched with photography or other video fleshed out aspects of assimilation and integration in the Baltics but were remarkably weak. Ironically, the only paradigm of "straight photography," as opposed to various uses of multimedia and mixed media art, was a body of work by Kaspars Goba from Latvia, "homo@lv, 2006-2007" (2007), which portrays lesbian and gay couples in and around Riga using traditional black-and-white photography.

Two other shows in Berlin demonstrated the vibrancy of the Baltic arts scene. "Crosskick: Riga Review," a student show at the NGBK, examined mixed media in Latvia and addressed themes of identity among youth in the Latvian capital. The photography series by Liene Dobraja, "Benzin" (2006), and Maija Kuseva's untitled series from 2006 deconstruct cliches of international advertising. "Benzin" is a play on the lifestyle ads of Diesel brand clothing and accessories, and the blend of commercial and personal tagging demonstrated by spray-can artists at work in Latvia and cities elsewhere. This critique of rampant consumer culture in countries defined for years by Soviet economies and Marxist sloganizing is as much a part of this new political process as the feelings of anomie and individualism.

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At a period when global brands are swallowing individual styles, the artistic life of a small country is equally at risk. On one hand, the greater exchange of ideas is positive, but the modes of cultural expression, of Latvian-ness, or Estonian-ness, which draw on centuries of tradition, are fast disappearing in a whirl of MTV and IKEA sameness. A body of work by Belorusian artist Artur Klinau, "Alice in Wonderland" (2006), at Galerie Giedre Bartelt, also focused on Baltic and East European topics and gives a humorous twist to Lewis Carroll's story. Alice, played by a doll in these staged photographs, embarks on her descent into wonderland by imbibing massive quantities of tea and vodka, those beloved potions of Eastern Europe. Her fall into a dreamworld of sex and violence is carried out with aplomb. A juxtaposition that grounds the surrealistic humor of the Alice series in a more down-to-earth interpretation of political symbolism through architecture is Klinau's straight photography of historical and Soviet-era buildings from Minsk in a shared exhibition with the Lithuanian artist Vytautis Balcytis, who also depicts buildings in Vilnius.

The energy of this work is testament to the reemergence of the Baltic nations after being under the control of various other countries throughout the centuries. To be sure, the Germans, Poles, Danes, Swedes, Russians, Nazis, and Soviets did have great cultural influence on Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and the polyvalent styles reflect this. Yet as countries (with the exception of Lithuania, which flourished independently during the late middle ages), they have only existed briefly between the first and second world wars and in the past fifteen years since the Soviet collapse. This has led to a level of nationalist outpouring and cultural expression that confronts the mass media and homogenization under the EU. The end result seems to be a happy schizophrenia that is extremely creative and transcends artistic disciplines as well as political and cultural boundaries.

BILL KOUWENHOVEN is a writer and photographer currently living and working in Berlin and New York City.