GNS+ Lecture: “Science, Art, and Power: Baltic Perspectives on Colonial Entanglements in Northern and Eastern Europe”

Dr. Linda Kaljundi (Estonian Academy of Arts)

April 14th at 4pm
Room 235, Pyle Center

Co-Sponsors: GNS+, CREECA, Department of Art History, Department of History, and the University Lectures Committee

Dr. Linda Kaljundi’s talk will take as its starting point the fact that the war in Ukraine has intensified the debates around decolonizing Russian imperialism. But it has also laid bare the relative absence of research in and debate on the history and afterlives of Russian colonialism, especially in the post-Soviet realm. Highlighting the entanglements between science, art and power, this lecture will explore visual culture as a source for analyzing Russian colonization of the Nordic realms in particular, as well as the potentials and problems of using the study of this legacy for the purposes of decolonization. Dr. Kaljundi will discuss the production of knowledge and power not from the perspective of the imperial centers, but as it manifested itself in the Baltic borderlands. The talk will first examine nineteenth-century scientific illustrations produced by Baltic German-speaking elites who participated extensively in the Russian imperial conquests, and then compare these with visual art produced by in the late Soviet period by Baltic artists and filmmakers during their expeditions. Inspired by the environmental movement and the ethnographic turn, their artistic research both opposed and imitated the earlier colonial discourses and practices. Building on these concrete case studies, the lecture will aim to address broader issues related to decolonizing processes in the post-Soviet realm and to situate them in a broader comparative framework.

Linda Kaljundi is a Professor of Cultural History at the Estonian Academy of Arts and a Senior Research Fellow at Tallinn University. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki. Specialising in Eastern European and Nordic history, historiography and cultural memory, as well as environmental history, she is first and foremost interested in finding new, entangled perspectives on the region’s transnational history, culture and environment. Kaljundi has published books and articles and edited collections on Baltic and Nordic history and history writing, heritage, historical fiction and images, as well as environmental and animal history. She has also curated several exhibitions at the Kumu Art Museum, most recent of these being the cooperative research and exhibition project Art or Science (2022).