Moving Memories

Beyond the post-soviet (Btps) approaches moving memories as a way to engage with multiple, entangled pasts and their unbroken continuity with living presents. For us, the past is never settled—it shifts, reemerges, and unsettles, because traces and memories remain alive: fragile, contested, and constantly reassembled. They migrate across bodies, geographies, and temporalities, resisting linear histories.

We understand memory as a political terrain—where imperial legacies, socialist imaginaries, and colonial continuities intersect with personal and collective narratives of displacement, silence, survival, and resistance. Through conversations, workshops, exhibitions, and installations, Btps interrogates how dominant histories are institutionalized in materials, monuments, and cultural forms—while asking what can be revisited, recontextualized, or brought into the light.

Our approach draws on decolonial, feminist, and diasporic frameworks, shaped by diverse postcolonial contexts. It is informed by thinkers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whose concept of silencing the past speaks to our efforts to surface erased or neglected narratives—whether through fleeting gestures or sustained inquiry. We are equally guided by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s call to unlearn imperialism, which orients our curatorial and collective work, especially across transnational and post-socialist geographies.

“Decolonizing/Desovietizing or Moving Memory of Places”Discussion between Yevheniia Moliar and Emmanuelle Thyot
Moderated by Zola Chichminsteva-Kondamambou
In the frame of Grey Is the Cube, Blue the Ellipse & CURA
With the support of Ministry of Culture of France, Cnap, and ASN
03.04.2024
House of Culture, Amiens, France

Yevheniia Moliar, The interior of the Palace of Culture in the city of Toretsk, Ukraine, 2022

A discussion titled “Decolonizing/Desovietizing or Moving Memory of Places” involved Yevheniia Moliar and Emmanuelle Thyot, specialists in Ukrainian and Martinican contexts. In conversation with Zola Chichmintseva-Kondamambou, they explored the colonial and imperial legacies present in public spaces across Martinique, mainland France, and Ukraine. Among the busts and statues depicting «illustrious» historical and political figures, and the imposing architectures that shape the landscape, how can we shake up the moving memories of our daily surroundings?

One day at a time, one time at the place, one place in the spaceExhibition by Evita VasiljevaIn the frame of Grey Is the Cube, Blue the Ellipse & CURA
With the support of Ministry of Culture of France, Cnap, and ASN
28.01.2025—15.05.2025
House of Culture, Amiens, France

Exhibition view. Photo: Romain Darnaud © ADAGP

Exhibition view. Photo: Romain Darnaud © ADAGP

Exhibition view. Photo: Romain Darnaud © ADAGP

One day at a time, one time at the place, one place in the space is an exhibition by Evita Vasiljeva that was curated by Btps at the House of Culture of Amiens (MCA).

Working with sculpture and installation, Evita Vasiljeva explores the memory of place and the relationship between body, space, and material. Drawing from the landscapes and generic architecture of the outskirts where she grew up, she engages with raw materials—concrete, metal rods, household objects—to reveal a tension between permanence and fragility, anonymity and intimacy.

The installation was conceived as a modular structure that can be displaced, assembled, and reassembled, features sculptural elements and archival travel imagery. At the MCA, its upward-reaching forms echoed the building’s modernist architecture—its use of concrete and its histories—inviting viewers to perceive their environments anew, with both poetry and solace.

These gestures recall the artist’s own memories of growing up in the suburbs of Riga during Latvia’s post-Soviet transition—where unfinished construction sites became her personal playgrounds. Her sculptural vocabulary draws from these ghost structures, exploring the individual within standardization, and the dual role of architecture as both refuge and constraint.

Also on view was Seven reasons why you should make time for the sunsets (2020–2021)—a glowing soap-cast sculpture containing flies. Emitting a steady light from behind the MCA’s glass façade day and night, it echoes the building’s mission as an open, continuous space—one that breathes with the rhythms of the city, from morning until dawn.

Evita Vasiljeva (b. 1985, Riga) has developed her practice across the Baltics, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Finland, and France. She has participated in the 14th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania and the 2022 Lyon Biennale, and in 2024-2025 was artist-in-residence at Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Her work is part of the Latvian National Museum of Art collection.

“‘All the Directions’. Art Collections Amidst Turbulence: A Decolonial Perspective from the East”
Workshop
Participants: Nadi Abusaada, ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich; Oksana Barshynova, Deputy Director of Exhibitions at the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU, Kyiv); Eva Barois De Caevel, Curator, Paris; Sasha Baydal, Interdependent art worker, Beyond the post-soviet, Île-de-France; Patricia Couvet, Curator, Slavs & Tatars, Beyond the post-soviet, Berlin; Marie-Noëlle Farcy, Chief collections curator, Mudam, Luxembourg; Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter, Artist and curator, Beyond the post-soviet, Chișinău; Yulia Fisch, Curator, Beyond the post-soviet, Basel: Lolita Jablonskienė, Curator, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Oksana Karpovets, Curator, Paris; Anton Obshta, Artist, videographer; Juliette Pollet, Curator, Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Interdependent curator, Cité internationale des arts, Paris; Rebecca Topakian, Artist, Paris; Eden Tinto Collins, Artist, Paris; Françoise Vergès, Decolonial thinker, writer, Paris
In the frame of “Moving Shadows. Colonial Outlines”
With the support of Cnap
29.11—30.11.2023
Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), Paris, France

Mircea Cantor, All the Directions, 2000. Copyright: Cnap

“All the Directions”, 30.11.2023, Cnap, Paris, France

The workshop introduced a comprehensive framework for collective introspection into contemporary art collections amidst the prevailing tumultuous era, which characterizes the trajectory of today's world. Rooted in a series of contemporary collections and recent cases of acquisitions spanning regions such as France, Luxembourg, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, USA, and Lebanon, the proposition adopts a decolonial perspective. It endeavors to tackle pressing concerns surrounding collection practices and visibility within the complex tapestry of global power dynamics. The two-day workshop, hosted at the Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris.

“All the directions” is the title of an artwork by Mircea Cantor—an artist born in Oradea in Romania and prominently featured in various Western collections. It portrays the artist situated on the fringes of an indistinct urban setting. Projecting the demeanor of a disoriented traveler, Mircea Cantor holds a sign typically denoting a specific direction. Yet, intentionally, the sign remains devoid of any indication—an embodiment of his willingness to embrace any path. We contextualized this image during a pivotal juncture in the socio-political landscape of geographical Europe. This period is marked by Russia's undeclared war against Ukraine, a substantial economic downturn, the escalating repercussions of the global climate crisis, the proliferation of anti-colonial narratives, and conversely, the surge of neo-fascist ideologies across the world. As history underscores museums as venues for constructing and disseminating national and historical narratives, as well as fostering identity formation (as posited by Benedict Anderson), the question arises: How can art institutions respond to the flux of these uncertain times, which have the potential to unfold in any of the directions?

By sharing a number of illustrative cases, along with individual and collective experiences, our aim was to raise probing inquiries: How do external crises exert their influence on Museums and other art institutions? In what manner do turbulent epochs alter the interplay of shadows and light, of stillness and sound? Specifically, how can they reveal the "gaps" and the "silencing of history" as articulated by Michel Rolph-Trouillot? What role do artists hailing from the "post-socialist countries" of Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus occupy within collections located in the Global West? What is the prevailing situation with art collections within these post-socialist countries? How might a decolonial perspective stemming from this region be employed to scrutinize the representation practices of Museums and art institutions in the Global West? What implications does this hold for the dynamics of acquisition, categorization, and exhibition?

Optical Prostheses
Exhibition by Danylo Halkin
With Pavlo Kerestey
In the frame of Grey Is the Cube, Blue the Ellipse & CURA
With the support of Ministry of Culture of France, Cnap, and ASN
22.01.2024—06.03.2024
House of Culture, Amiens, France

Exhibition view. Photo: Diane Arques © ADAGP

Exhibition view. Photo: Diane Arques © ADAGP

Exhibition view. Photo: Diane Arques © ADAGP

The program Grey Is the Cube, Blue the Ellipse by the collective Beyond the post-soviet, offered a reading of Amiens in its interconnectedness with the so-called “socialist” and “post-socialist” countries of Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. The program launched with the exhibition Optical Prostheses by Ukrainian artist Danylo Halkin.

Originally from the city of Dnipro and a resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris at that time, Halkin took over the first floor of the House of Culture with a monumental installation: Optical Prostheses. Begun in 2022—the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—this project comprises stained-glass windows from the Soviet era and large-scale drawings. Carefully evacuated by the artist from eastern Ukraine, the stained-glass pieces find a temporary new life at the Maison de la Culture in Amiens during the exhibition. The drawings, made with black pastel, are 1:1 scale reproductions of stained-glass artworks still present in Ukraine—particularly in Dnipro—that face daily risk of destruction.

Optical Prostheses presents and interrogates these objects, which in Ukraine have often been categorized as industrial design. They decorate administrative buildings, military facilities, and factories in Dnipro—a city rich in the heritage of socialist modernism, an architectural and artistic style that shapes the urban landscape of many Ukrainian cities. These stained-glass pieces are often made invisible—abandoned due to neglect, dismantled intentionally, damaged or destroyed by war, or lost to real estate privatization. Since the adoption of “decommunization” laws in Ukraine from 2014, which ban Soviet-era symbols in public spaces, only recognized artworks are exempt. As monuments are toppled globally in decolonial movements, Soviet symbols tied to oppression are likewise dismantled in Ukraine. Yet stained glass—rarely granted the status of “artwork”—is often removed, destroyed, or simply left to decay. This process has accelerated with the war: Dnipro has been heavily bombed since 2022, and the fragility of glass renders these objects particularly vulnerable.

Sensing the imminent disappearance of this cultural heritage, Halkin began collecting pieces in an effort to preserve them from slow decay or possible destruction. This act of preservation invites viewers to look anew at these works, whose past carries strong and often painful symbolism for Ukrainians, given the oppression inflicted by the Soviet Union. In a war where one of Russia’s goals is to sever Ukraine from its cultural heritage, preserving stained glass becomes an act of counter-strategy. By relocating these pieces to an art exhibition context, Halkin reduces their ideological burden and invites us to view them primarily as artworks—many of which were created by Ukrainian artists.
In resonance with Danylo Halkin’s gesture of preservation, the video work Cleaning FMK (2008) by Pavlo Kerestey—an artist born in Ukraine in 1962 who himself contributed to creating stained-glass works during the socialist period—shows him carefully cleaning a monumental stained-glass piece located in the plywood furniture factory in Uzhhorod. The camera frames the work, partially visible, inscribed with socialist values: “peace,” “work,” “freedom,” “equality,” “fraternity.” Climbing a ladder, the artist slowly cleans the glass and its metal framework.

Although many artists in socialist Ukraine participated in producing ideological artworks, the video shifts attention from grand historical narratives to the fate of one object and one artist. Having lived abroad, Kerestey returns to Ukraine to carry out and document a small act of care for an object that holds memory of the past—an object whose disappearance could lead to the erosion of both individual and collective memory.

Presented at the Maison de la Culture in Amiens and visible from the outside, Optical Prostheses entered into dialogue with the building’s transparency—a structure originally designed to be traversed by the city’s central axis. Coming from a context that may seem distant, Halkin’s stained-glass works make visible what often remains unspoken and reveal potential links between French cultural policies and those of former socialist countries. They also open up space to reimagine how structures, objects, and places—products of ideological regimes—might be repurposed to forge new forms of solidarity and coexistence.

“Colonialism in camouflage and the subaltern who speaks: politics and resistance under Russian rule”
Keynote lecture by Epp Annus
Launch of a public program Colonialism in Camouflage
As part of the Radio Disaster series
06.11.2022
Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg

The Radio Disaster Series: Colonialism in camouflage was a public program co-curated by the collective Beyond the post-soviet and Mudam. It was devoted to decolonial thinking and how it can be used to critically reflect on and resist the insidiousness of imperialist and colonial rhetoric and practices across Europe and in post-colonial territories. Its first chapter was a response to the urge of acknowledging continued imperial violence in Central Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, the Caucasus, Central Asia and beyond, as well as their long-term repercussions on societies and their expression in visual arts.

The program borrowed its title from Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (2018), a book by literary scholar and writer Epp Annus, who uses the expression ‘colonialism in camouflage’ to highlight diverse strategies of Soviet domination that she considers to be disguised forms of colonialism. Deployed in multiple regions, these strategies entailed territorial occupations, deportations, genocides, man-made famines, repression of local cultures and imaginaries and a conscious eroding of cultural memory. The title also refers to a long history of military violence in these regions, wherein the recent Russian military offensive in Ukraine is not an isolated event but the result of ongoing imperial-colonial strategies and mindset.

Colonialism in all its forms is a global phenomenon that shaped – and continues to shape – policies and practices not only in Asia, Africa and the Americas, but also on the Eurasian continent. Colonial legacies and deep-rooted injustice still determine both human and nonhuman ways of living on our planet. This talk by Epp Annus addressed the history and legacy of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union from a postcolonial perspective, relying on case studies from the Baltic region and Ukraine. It was be followed by a discussion between Epp Annus, Beyond the post-soviet and the audience.

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