“Tell me about the ones who sleep through storms,” curated by Erik Martinson, December 10, 2017

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“Tell me about the ones who sleep through storms”
curated by Erik Martinson

Remote viewing is a form of extrasensory perception that functions as a kind of psychic reconnaissance: a receptive individual projects or travels out of their body to a place, object, or time unknown to them, then reports back on what they have found there. In this programme of films and videos by artists in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, remote viewing is posited as a portal across time, history and personal experience. While eyes outside the Baltic region often impose a desire for a “post-Soviet” or “former-East” lens on the region’s history, the works in this programme — ranging from the reworked celluloid of a Soviet propaganda film, frames fluttering, shifting in clarity like so many post-memories, to chance encounters with hip-hop legends, their anthems pivotal for many in the transitioning cultural and political landscape of the early 1990s — address (or don’t address) that history as an object that exists in the present, a free-floating alien that is as perplexing within as it is without.

With remote viewing, there is some shared imaginative ground between the descendants of those who stayed and the variously located diasporas from the region — the feeling that one has been handed an envelope with a place, a time, and nothing other than the mind to envision the homeland as it used to be; or, perhaps, the distant vision of an ever-receding horizon, the vanishing past occasioned by a major political and ideological shift. In either case, not existing in that former place, or not remembering that time, is akin to a period of hibernation — a sleeping through storms. —Erik Martinson

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Chris Kennedy

“Tell me about the ones who sleep through storms,” curated by Erik Martinson, December 10, 2017