A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Lia Dostlieva is an Ukrainian artist, essayist, cultural anthropologist and researcher at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Focusing on trauma, postmemory, commemorative practices, and agency and visibility of vulnerable groups and how to process “difficult knowledge” and “difficult past”.
Andrii Dostliev is an independent Ukrainian artist, curator, and photography researcher currently based in Poland. His primary areas of interest are memory, trauma, identity – both personal and collective, and various aspects of queerness. Works in various media.
The roundtable ”Urban Space in Transition after the Collapse of the USSR” arranged at CBEES September 21, 2021 by Irina Seits, offered perspectives on the approaches to architectural heritage, and the ways memory is made and remade in urban spaces after the dissolution of the USSR, in four examples from both Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Kivinen, Markku & Humphreys, Brendan (eds.). (London and New York: Routledge 2021). xxv and 368 pages.
Fyrar runt Östersjön. [Lighthouses around the Baltic Sea] Magnus Rietz, (Stockholm: Lind & Co, 2019), 415 pages
New Conservatives in Russia and East Central Europe. Eds. Katharina Bluhm and Mihai Varga (London: Routledge, 2019), 309 pages.
At the Edge of the Wall: Public and Private Spheres in Divided Berlin, Hanno Hochmuth, (Berghahn Books: New York, 2021), 358 pages.
The deinstitutionalization as a policy shift introduced an entirely new principle of care in contemporary Russia. It brought the right to live in a family to the center of the care system, seeing residential, collective care as being harmful to children. The analysis shows that children left without family and placed in institutional care are mainly “social orphans”, meaning that their parents are alive but deprived of parental rights.
From 1958, the lyric character of the diary entries becomes more intense. On the other hand they gain a further dimension of universality. They can be interpreted as saying that he would like the personal to remain even less known, and that the poeticizing is a means of concealment. Both may be equally true. If Markings were a fictional diary, one might say that the foreshadowing of death was a structural feature
The essay presents a new reflection on aesthetics within the wider understanding of the role of political rhythms in hybrid regimes. Aesthetics and politics “are not two permanent and separate realities about which it might be asked if they must be put in relation to one another”. On the contrary, the argument the author proposes in this essay presents an idea of how a political establishment disposes a new set of spatial practices through the field of aesthetics.
This essay analyses two texts by the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski (1952–2015) articulating theoretical stances towards art museography. Reflecting on how they deal with psychological as well as openly political issues, I interpret and assess their joint contribution to the broader interdisciplinary field of (critical) museography. The texts are “New Museums in New Europe” and “Making the National Museum Critical”. Together the texts developed Piotrowski’s concept of “the critical museum” as a way of dealing with the challenges of running an old national art museum based on masterpieces while also striving to engage with pressing contemporary issues. which is a prerequisite for critical intervention.
Feminist comic art in Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Sea region raises the question of whether it is possible to find a common denominator for feminist comic art. Are feminist comics connected by certain aesthetic qualities or themes? Is there a shared conception of feminism that is recognizable in the comics produced in the Baltic Sea region? The answer to both questions is ”no”. As much as there is an exchange of ideas and aesthetic influences between artists in different countries, there are local varieties specific to countries and individual artists. Furthermore, variations in contemporary conceptions of feminism seem to depend on varying historical conditions and experiences in the different countries.