Decolonizing the Eastern European Museum in the Shadow of War: Un/learning from the Estonian Experience

A presentation by Linda Kaljundi (Estonian Academy of Arts / Fulbright Visting Professor at MIT)

In the tense and tragic context of Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine, the question of how to decolonize Eastern Europe is as complex as ever, on both a conceptual-theoretical and practical level. In her talk, Linda Kaljundi argues that while Eastern European museums have been the site of various and often fierce debates about the legacies of colonialism, they also offer valuable case studies and models for the decolonization of Eastern Europe and Central Asia more broadly.

Drawing from her curatorial research in the transdisciplinary exhibition projects “Art in the Age of the Anthropocene” (2023), “Art and Science” (2022), and “The Conqueror's Eye” (2019), Kaljundi examines critical object and collection histories as a way of working through colonial history and colonial amnesia, but also the ways in which borderlands of the former Russian empire have been entangled with and implicated in the colonial and imperial projects.

About the presenter:

Linda Kaljundi is a historian, curator and professor of cultural history at the Estonian Academy of Arts and a senior research fellow in environmental history at Tallinn University. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki.

Kaljundi has published on Baltic and Nordic premodern and modern history and historiography, collective memory and nation building, as well as the entangled histories of environment, colonialism and science. She has also co-curated a number of interdisciplinary exhibitions, including The Conqueror’s Eye (2019), Landscapes of Identities: Estonian Art 1700–1945 (2021, ongoing), Art or Science (2022), and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023), all at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn.

She has co-edited a number of article collections and exhibition catalogues, as well as published a monograph on visual culture as a medium of cultural memory (History in Images – Image in History: National and Transnational Past in Estonian Art, with Tiina-Mall Kreem, 2018).

This event is organized by the Thinking Through the Museum Research Network, with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Concordia University.

Location:

Curating and Public Scholarship Lab

Library Building Room LB 671

1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W.

Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, QC, Canada

Accessibility:

The Curating and Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL) is regrettably not wheelchair accessible. There is one small flight of five stairs leading to the entrance of CaPSL but otherwise, the 6th floor of the Library building is accessible by elevator. KN95 masks are provided at the door. To raise other accessibility requests or questions please contact us by email.