Visual Culture of the Baltic Exile Communities (Riga, 11 Sep 26)
The study of the Baltic exile communities following the Second World War has often concentrated on the seemingly inextinguishable energy that these communities displayed in combining their carefully defined political, social and cultural ambitions with their commitment to self-preservation. This dual mission required resounding resilience. The importance of their visual cultures in this process, however, has not received the interest it deserves. The aim of the 2026 "Homburger Gespräch" shall be to delve deeper into how visuality in the Baltic exile communities after the Second World War helped them shape their understanding of reality.
This shall be done by assembling conversational partners from various backgrounds and fields to Riga for a day-long colloquy. The focus shall not primarily be on formal aesthetics, text and speech, but rather on how cultural meaning, codes and identity were formed through visual cues. The notion of seeing shall be ever-present in these discussions. What did its members choose to see and what not to see and how did new ways of seeing evolve in the new environments? How did geography and history leave its mark on this seeing? How were space, color, materiality negotiated?
Attention shall be focused on the time period between 1944 and 1991. This does not, however, mean that the communities did not draw on visual perceptions prior to this period and did not reconfigure this visuality retrospectively once the exile experience in the formal sense of the word came to an end in 1991. By incorporating the most varying impulses from periods “prior and post”; and by, at times, engaging their new environments, at others, secluding themselves from them, an enhanced multifariousness and manifoldness evolved.
A collaborative colloquy (Homburger Gespräch 2026) under the auspices of the Böckler-Mare-Balticum-Foundation (Bad Homburg) in collaboration with the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz-Association (Marburg) and the Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga)
Concept: Agnese Bergholde-Wolf, Jānis Krēsliņš, Ulrike Nürnberger, Dietmar Popp
Please register for the conference: geschaeftsstelle@boeckler-mare-balticum-stiftung.de
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