As an extension of the focus on geographical positions of the group exhibition Identity Paradox, the second bal conference invites artists, curators and researchers to talk about queer*feminist perspectives in the Balkans and the Baltics.

Eastern European queer*feminism is a term that cannot exist by itself. Feminism is still global (Western) and Eastern European queer*feminisms is double marginalized: rejected in their countries of origin and mirrored by their exclusion from the mainstream Western narratives. After the collapse of the political structures where equality was pretended and existed only in the narratives of propaganda, gender manifestations were hidden in complex concepts, feminisms were underground, and representations of sexuality were clandestine. The existence of such unofficial culture had to be erased together with had to be erased with the preexisted system, as long with its lexicon. The genealogy of gender in other Europe is disrupted.

The last thirty and more years is about creating itself and failed attempts to become Western, and finally getting on the feminist pluralism train. Those who refuse to contextualize themselves will be implanted into a context by someone else and then run the risk of no longer recognising themselves. The queer part as in many other feminisms across the globe, is only slowly accepted in gender studies discipline and circulates the relatively closed art territories which are paradoxically more open to the outside world than to the societies that surround these territories.

PROGRAM

October 20, 6-10 PM

Improper Walls, Reidorfgasse 42, 1150 Vienna

6 PM - Welcoming drink

6:30 PM - Movie screening
Under the Same Sky by Diana Tamane, 54’’
(free entrance - reserve your seat)

7:30 PM - Movie screening
KOLEKTИV by David Dawson, Nina Vukadin (EYESORE), 38’’
(free entrance - reserve your seat)

October 21, 12 - 5 PM

Improper Walls, Reidorfgasse 42, 1150 Vienna and online

12 PM - Tea/coffee

12:30 PM - Introduction/presentation of the publication

1 PM - Presentations

Socialism with a Straight Face: Homophobia and LGBT people in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania
by Rasa Navickaitė

Not-quite-Other: Cinema and the East European Intruder
by Sebastjan Brank

Short discussion and Q&M

2 - 3 PM - Lunch break

3 PM - Presentations

Feminist, lesbian and queer culture from a personal perspective in Yugoslavia!
by Zoe Gudović

Looking for the roots of Estonian feminism: the Soviet chapter
by Piret Karro

Short discussion and Q&M

4 PM - Closing remarks

October 21, 8 PM - 1 AM

Die Wäscherei, Albertgasse 49, 1080 Vienna

8 PM - Performances

bENGA wRONG
Zed Zeldich Zed
mirabella paidamwoyo dziruni
Querelle
DJ Set Pêdra Costa

(free entrance)

SPEAKERS

Piret Karro

Piret Karro is a researcher, curator, journalist and poet. She studied semiotics at the University of Tartu and graduated from the Critical Gender Studies MA program at the Central European University in 2020. Her MA thesis „You’re being hysterical“ and „This is a witch-hunt“: Discourses discrediting gender in Estonian media was awarded an honorary mention by the Estonian Science Council.

Karro is also active as a freelance writer and poet. She has published critical essays and articles since 2011 in Estonian literary journals, magazines and daily press, and worked as the cultural editor at the biggest Estonian subcultures magazine Müürileht in 2015–2018. Her monthly column Power and Gender was published in the cultural weekly Sirp in 2020–2021. Her poetry and other texts have been translated into Hungarian, Russian, Lithuanian, and English. 

Karro is currently working as an advisor at the Equality Policy Department at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of Estonia.

The talk: Looking for the roots of Estonian feminism: the Soviet chapter

Piret Karro’s presentation at the conference derives from her research interest in the development of feminisms in ex-Soviet spaces. During her studies at CEU, she realized that feminist movements in Estonia have not been researched enough, despite the region having been important in the history of global (working class) women. 

The research also launched a curatorial project 150 years of Estonian feminism. The exhibition opened in March 2023 at VABAMU Museum of Occupations and Freedom (Tallinn, Estonia), where Karro worked as the Curator and Head of Exhibitions. The exhibition remains open until March 2024.

In her presentation, Karro discusses the contradictions between the mainstream narrative of the history of feminism in the Global North and the feminist movements that have emerged from the ex-Soviet regions. 

zoe gudović

zoe gudović is a lesbian artist, feminist, activist, cultural manager, producer and organizer. She comes from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and from October 2021 she lives in Vienna.  Since 1995, she has been involved in the work and research of informal and engaged theater forms. In her practice, she combines art and activism in order to change the existing consciousness and social relations. Theater educator. Performer. Drag King Transformer. Toilet artist. Worked, founded or was in groups and collectives: Women at Work, Act Women, Queer Belgrade, Charming Princess-band, Reconstruction Women's Fund, Ephemeral Confessions. Lecturer at Women's Studies (Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade), on the topic of Femist Art in Public Space. Organizer of street engagement performances against violence against women. Organizer of numerous campaigns for the visibility of LGBTQ +, women's human rights and people from the margins. Since 2001, she has connected artists from all over the world with activists from Serbia under the name "Women's Movement - Women's Theater - Women's Body". Winner of the Jelena Šantić Award for a combination of art and activism. Winner of Befem’s Feminist Achievement Award for promoting feminism outside the feminist movement. 

zoe got scholarships/residencies: Handle with care selected by BEATE, brut wien, 2022, Goethe institute Serbia, 2018/2019/2020, Art residence Villa Waldberta, Munich, 2018 and 2019

She edits and hosts the radio show Ženergija. From June 2022 we can listen to her show once a week live on ORANGE 94.0.

The talk: Feminist, lesbian and queer culture from a personal perspective in Yugoslavia!

We are witnessing the richness of a marginalized cultural scene in Yugoslavia, that is a scene that is not recognized as such due to the patriarchy of the culture. Political art has been around for as long as art history. The need to record the life hertory of feminist, lesbian, and trans artists and present their previous work in the area of the former Yugoslavia is my passion. Starting from myself, lesbian artists indicate how the period of war, suffering, and genocide marked our development; some of us very unequivocally criticize all those dominant combinations of power and violence in our work.

Rasa Navickaitė

Dr. Rasa Navickaitė is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow at the Research Platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe" at the University of Vienna. Her current project MOSELIT investigates the history of gender and sexuality in Soviet Lithuania with a particular focus on LGBTQ people. She is the author of the monograph Marija Gimbutas: Transnational Biography, Feminist Reception, and the Controversy of Goddess Archaeology (Routledge, 2023). Navickaitė has published in academic (Nordost-Archiv. Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte, Lambda Nordica, Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Baltic Worlds) and non-academic (Lrt.lt, Delfi.lt, Šiaurės Atėnai, Literatūra ir menas, Eurozine, VoxEurope, etc.) venues. Currently she is working on a new book project, which would tell a story about the lives of LGBTQ peoples and the various forms of homophobia they encountered in the twentieth century Lithuania.


The talk: Socialism with a Straight Face: Homophobia and LGBT people in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania

In this talk I will present the findings of my postdoctoral research project MOSELIT – “Modernization of Sexuality and the Construction of Deviance in Soviet Lithuania". Based on archival research and oral history narratives I will discuss the structures of homophobia as a part of the Soviet modernization project and the ways they affected the lives of LGBTQ people. As in many other contexts throughout the twentieth century, the biopolitical focus on reproductive family and traditional gender roles rendered any deviation from the sexual norm medicalized, criminalized and stigmatized. I will ask however, what makes the Soviet and the Lithuanian SSR context specific and different from both “the West” and other socialist contexts. How come male homosexuality remained criminalized up until 1993? How come almost no lesbians came out in Lithuania up until recently? Why did religious and traditionalist-nativist discourses take over the narratives of Soviet homophobia so successfully? This talk is both a meditation on the limitations of LGBTQ people’s agency during the Soviet and post-Soviet times, and a reflection on the current state of community, as well as and its role in carving some space for the queer memory within the (trans)national historical narrative.

Sebastjan Brank

Sebastjan Brank is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. His writing was published in Flash Art, Spike Art Magazine and Third Text Journal (forthcoming).

The talk: Not-quite-Other: Cinema and the East European Intruder

This essay attempts to think through the topos of home invasion in film in relation to Eastern European subjectivity. Departing from films such as "Teorema” (1969), “Sitcom” (1998), and “Visitor Q” (2001), it argues that home invasion films not only symbolize the intrusion into supposedly autonomous domestic spaces but, more importantly, reveal the violence/obscenity inherent in the spaces of everyday bourgeois domesticity. Using the figure of the Eastern European aggressor in home invasion films such as "Them" (2006) and "Kidnapped" (2010), the essay analyses the figure of the intruder via Piotr Piotrowski’s assertion that “the non-European “Other” is a real “Other”," while the Central or Eastern European Other is a “not-quite-Other” or a “near Other”. The figure of the "not-quite-Other" comes to carry the weight of the permeable boundaries between the home and its outside world.

Publication

Marijo Zupanov, Pille-Riin Jaik, Vladimir Bjeličić, Dino Pešut, Goda Aksamitauskaitė

Team

Hana Čeferin, Merete Väin, Urtė Špeirokaitė, Julija Karim, Miloš Vučićević, Justina Špeirokaitė