Long-distance Friendships

The 14th Kaunas Biennial (Kaunas, Lithuania) and Contemporary Art Festival Survival Kit 14 (Riga, Latvia) announce Alicia Knock and Inga Lāce as the co-curators of Long-distance Friendships. A programme of events driven by shared research, friendship, and exchange of ideas, will activate decolonial perspectives and aesthetics across both sites, in each country. Through the overlooked lens of personal exchange and relationships drawn from transnational research paths, the collaboration will engage in the history of emancipatory struggles that connected Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and certain countries in Africa. The Soviet Union and other Socialist bloc countries played an important role in the processes of decolonisation in Africa from economic, infrastructural and military support, to education and cultural exchanges driven to expand influence and promote socialism globally. Ideologically driven, those exchanges nevertheless offered personal, often transformative experiences to the community of students, artists or workers involved. Departing from these past exchanges that were used by the Soviet ideology to strengthen its influence in the world, Knock and Lāce propose alternative perspectives for the future. As the seemingly forgotten, yet so present, the traumatic past of the region is looming back in the daily lives of Eastern European societies with the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the curators  ask: in a time of geopolitical fragmentation, can international alliances be forged and nurtured based on friendship and solidarity rather than power and market dynamics?