Panel discussion at the new exhibition To Pay an Arm and a Leg

7 December at 15:00–16:00 at Kogo Gallery

 Panel discussion at the new exhibition To Pay an Arm and a Leg. Participants: artist Elīna Vītola, curator and art scholar Ieva Astahovska, literary scholar Eneken Laanes and artist Ulla Juske.


How can art engage in revisiting the difficult, silenced past? What are its different ways of reflecting on the conflicts of memory and the traumatic and violent experiences of the Second World War? Do we understand it differently, if an artist speaks about this past not by engaging with documentary approaches, direct evidence or archival materials, but by using an abstract artistic language?
Read more about the exhibition: https://www.kogogallery.ee/.../to-pay-an-arm-and-a-leg/
The panel discussion will take place in English and is free of charge. The event is funded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the City of Tartu.


 Elīna Vītola (1986) is an artist based in Riga. Classically trained as a painter at the Art Academy of Latvia (BA and MA), Vītola has taken up this medium as a companion in her artistic journey to disentangle some issues that are connected with her identity as an artist and the art world in general and to build new platforms for other artists. Vītola has participated in exhibitions at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Tallinn Art Hall, Kadriorg Art Museum in Tallinn, the University of Tartu Art Museum, Kogo Gallery in Tartu and P/////AKT in Amsterdam. Kogo Gallery presented her solo installation Common Issues in Painting and Everyday Life at Liste Art Fair Basel 2024. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Purvītis Prize, in 2018, she received the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award.
 Ieva Astahovska (1979) is an art scholar and curator. She works at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, where she leads research projects related to art and culture in socialist and post-socialist periods and entanglements between postsocialist and postcolonial perspectives in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. Her recently curated exhibitions include Decolonial Ecologies. Understanding the Postcolonial after Socialism in Riga (2022) and Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds (2022–2024) co-curated with Margaret Tali, shown in Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn.
 Eneken Laanes (1972) is a professor of comparative literature at Tallinn University and head of the European Research Council project Translated Memory: Eastern European Past on the Global Arena. Her research focuses on transnational memory and transcultural forms of memory in the memory culture of post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
 Ulla Juske (1986) is an artist with a background in sculpture and semiotics, who through her work has reflected on issues related to her place, home and belonging. From 2022, Ulla works as the executive director of the Centre for Semiotic Applications of the University of Tartu.

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