Riga, Latvia
30 – 31 October, 2025
Deadline for applications – 22 August 2025
The conference will focus on monuments from the Soviet occupation period, paying particular attention to their ambiguous but significant place in the context of the cultural heritage of the recent Soviet past. Conference participants are invited to discuss these monuments not only as remnants of a past regime, but also as tangible and intangible heritage of the Soviet era and as historical evidence of the occupation, which should be included in the process of explaining and updating history.
The conference organisers invite applications from cultural heritage specialists, art scholars, artists, as well as historians, memory studies researchers, and scholars from other fields working on issues related to monuments as dissonant heritage.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, issues of decoloniality and deSovietisation have gained new relevance in many parts of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region, prompting a critical re-examination of colonial and occupation legacies. One of the most controversial issues is the “cleansing” of public spaces of symbols of the past – monuments to Soviet occupation. Both in Latvia and elsewhere, this has been accompanied by widespread campaigns to remove or dismantle monuments dedicated to various cultural figures who collaborated with the regime. Polarised views on this topic range from demands to rewrite history and erase from public space the memory of events and individuals that glorify totalitarian regimes, Russification policies, and collaborationism, on the one hand, to concerns about the simplification and revisionism of history, the fragmentation of memory and censorship, and the replacement of historical research with political interpretations and similar practices of rewriting history that were common during the occupation, on the other.
Can the public sphere accommodate more than an ideologically unambiguous view of the past, and can artistic and cultural values be separated from their political context? Can monuments ever not be part of the process of explaining and actualising history, including the ideological, cultural, and human contradictions of the occupation period? Perhaps it is possible not to remove these monuments, but to involve them in public discourse on totalitarian regimes, to recontextualise them, and to give them new meanings? What kinds of monuments do we need today and why?
Possible themes include but are not limited to:
– monuments and other memorial cultural objects as evidence and explanatory elements of Soviet history and ideology;
– the involvement of artists and other cultural figures in the implementation of Soviet ideology and its representation in monuments;
– the relationship between Soviet power and national narratives of the past;
– the process of preserving or removing monuments and the controversy/polemics surrounding it in the Baltic States and Eastern Europe since 2022;
– the decolonial turn and the impact of postcolonial and decolonial discourse on the monument removal process;
– monuments from the Soviet period as reminders of the complexity of the region’s histories; – monuments and memory politics in relation to themes of historical conflicts, tragedies, and traumas;
– monuments as evidence of the cultural and historical heterogeneity of the Soviet period, its different historical interpretations, and their various historical, artistic, urban, cultural heritage, and educational aspects; – analysis of examples of the motivation and context of artists and cultural figures in creating monuments, and how these contexts are reflected in the current political situation;
– analysis of the relationship between artists and the institutions regulating artistic processes; – legal, political, historical, anthropological, art historical, monument protection and preservation, and heritage and memory aspects related to monument removal campaigns;
– the involvement of contemporary art, exhibitions, and art projects in the decolonisation debate, including the revision of controversial monuments.
The conference “Monuments of the Soviet Occupation Period as Dissonant Heritage” will take place at the Latvian Academy of Art in Riga.
Submission of applications: Interested participants are invited to submit a summary of their paper (no more than 200 words) and a short biography by 22 August 2025 to: [email protected].
Confirmation of participation in the conference will be sent by 29 August 2025.
If you require further information, please write to [email protected]
The conference is organised by the Latvian Society of Art Historians and Curators in collaboration with the Art Academy of Latvia, the Latvian National Heritage Board, and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. Conference working group: Ieva Astahovska, Rihards Pētersons, Jana Grostiņa, Dana Stuce.
