Faster than History yet Slower than a Lifetime
The publication Faster than History broadens and deepens the thematic perspectives of the exhibition itself: time and history, the past and the present, the causes and consequences of great changes. It works also as a handbook for the artists’ projects. All 20 artists of the exhibition are presented with a text and illustrations. The four main texts examine the relationship between the present and the recent past in terms of the individual, and also in a broader social context.
In his essay Faster than History yet Slower than a Lifetime, the Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis analyses changes that have taken place in the concept of history in the postmodern era, with particular focus on the topicality of the term ’faster than history’. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the speed of social and cultural change has accelerated, meaning that a lifetime is not long enough to witness the result of this process and all its consequences. The sociologist Risto Alapuro’s essay Familiar and Alien analyses cultural loans and processes of assimilation, the kind of creative misunderstandings that are especially typical of Russian culture. Currently, Russia is assimilating all sorts of things from a wide range of geographically and historically different sources and layers, but it is the meeting with the West that produces the dynamic field of interaction where Russian and foreign, familiar and strange elements engage in a dialogue. Senior research fellow Pertti Joenniemi’s article Europe’s North: A Region of Border- Making or Border-Breaking? gives the back-ground to one of the key themes of the exhibition, the breaking of old boundaries and the emergence of new ones. With its expansion, the European Union in particular has created a new boundary between Europe and Russia, running geographically along the eastern border of Finland and the Baltic countries, a boundary whose importance in the future can only increase.
Irina Sandomirskaya, cultural researcher, has chosen as her text the diary entries of a Russian woman, which serve as an auto-biographical window offering a view of one entire century – or ’my century’, as the writer of the diaries remarks. Emerging from this saga of mundane events are those things – survival, resistance, guilt and forgiveness – which could not be committed on paper.
The presentations of the artistic projects also highlight subjective observations of the presence and impact of the past in the present. Although the actual background of the exhibition is themes that are tangible and serious, most of the works are tinged with black humour and intelligent, sharp observations of the state of things as seen from the perspective of the individual. The artist presentations are written by Ekaterina Degot, Eero Epner, Andrei Fomenko, Herwig Höller, Solvita Krese, Raimundas Malasauskas and Heie Treier and others.
