Conference ‘bal’

Online: link

Speakers: Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė, Jelisaveta Rapaić, Pille-Riin Jaik, Smirna Kulenović, God’s Entertainment 

Moderators: Lara Mejač, Magdalena Kozlovskaja 

Organisers: Improper Walls & LT.art Vienna

bal is a transdisciplinary comparative collaboration project delving into the realms of art and culture in the Baltics and the Balkans. This project serves as an active interspace, fostering diversity tension, and opening avenues for cultural mutation and transformation. The project's framework encompasses residencies, exhibitions, conferences, and publications while its research extends across all Baltic States and the post-Yugoslav space.

Presentations

Smirna Kulenović (BA)

Her research explores what she calls the alchemy of fear — an artistic and ritual process that engages directly with landscapes marked by war, violence, and cultural memory in the Balkans. Here, fear is not an abstract emotion but a residue embedded in soil, bark, and bodies: the clay of mass graves, the silence of mined fields, the camouflage of trees that once concealed soldiers. To inhabit such terrains is to confront a geography saturated with fear. Her practice asks: how can this fear be digested, metabolized, and transformed into resilience?

Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė (LT)

In this upcoming performative lecture, Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė will stage a fictional dialogue with the director of a former industrial canteen in Lithuania—preserved today as a monument to the Soviet past. The lecture will intertwine spoken narrative, theoretical reflection, and edible elements to invite participants into a shared experience of memory, embodiment, and critique. The lecture will explore the canteen as a site shaped by histories of labour, occupation, and resistance. Through an imagined exchange, Bagdžiūnaitė will examine how Soviet infrastructures persist as ideological and emotional residues within post-industrial contexts.

Pille-Riin Jaik (EE/AT)

Notes on a Research: The Last Relic
Can a symbol of freedom like a horse run in the Baltic swamps? What lungs would it need to survive a geopolitical hypoxia to keep its voice? In a closer look at the cult film “The Last Relic” (1969, Estonia) and a 4km trench in the bog of Pääsküla close to Tallinn, similarities start to appear. In overlapping storytelling, the sites of memory and land become echoes of each other, touching upon geopolitical realities of the Baltic present and pasts, where different military land enclosures and compromises on the living conditions keep clouding the region. A lecture performance of a research in process.

Jelisaveta Rapaić (RS/SK)

Textiles and womanhood have a complicated history, intertwined with labour division, submission, liberation, subversion, colonialism, domesticity, craft…one questions if the practice of creating within the textile medium today can ever be fully emancipated and considered feminist, or does its current interpretation inherently build upon and depend on the Western traditional gender roles and labor division we interpret it through? How is the medium being deployed as a tool for building narratives of equality and can it find its liberating purpose in nonwestern learnings and histories? Are we being too much? How to cautiously and critically examine the ‘’re-discovery’’ of textile art we have noticed in the international exhibitions in the last decade?

God’s Entertainment (AT)
The “active neutrality” staged in the picture and the fear of showing one's face can hardly be viewed in isolation from current Austrian foreign policy. It seems like a balancing act between conflicting interests—an attempt to sit on two chairs at the same time and, preferably, to shit on both. All in the hope of not having to take a clear position.

This is the geometry of fear, which manifests itself not only in the perspective but also in the diplomatic reflex of permanent hypocrisy: representing everything and nothing at the same time – the double standards of high-level diplomacy! 

Supported by MA7, BMWKMS, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Lithuanian Embassy in Vienna, Art & Science department at University of Applied Arts Vienna

Team: Hana Čeferin, Merete Väin, Urtė Špeirokaitė, Julija Karimžanova, Miloš Vučićević, Justina Špeirokaitė

Graphic design: René Vogelmann