General Public

The Baltic Studies Program of the Yale MacMillan Center presents a screening of “Burial” with the film’s Director and Writer Emilija Škarnulytė
Location: HQ (Humanities Quadrangle) Rm L02, 320 York St.
2022 | 60 min. | Documentary | Lithuania, Norway
Synopsis
A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl’s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years. From Etruscan ruins and sunken cities to the most modern of underground repositories, director Emilija Škarnulytė follows our attempts to bury the immortal. Addressing the epochal effects of nuclear technology on all levels, Burial follows the cycle of power, an eternal return, another serpent eating its tail.
Bio: Emilija Škarnulytė (b. Vilnius, Lithuania 1987) is an artist and filmmaker.
Working between documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Her blind grandmother gently touches the weathered statue of a Soviet dictator. Neutrino detectors and particular colliders measure the cosmos with otherworldly architecture. Post-human species swim through submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle and crawl through tectonic fault lines in the Middle Eastern desert.
Winner of the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, Škarnulytė represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano and was included in the Baltic Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. With solo exhibitions at Tate Modern (2021), Kunsthaus Pasquart (2021), Den Frie (2021), National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2021), CAC (2015) and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (2017), she has participated in group shows at Ballroom Marfa, Seoul Museum of Art, Kadist Foundation, and the First Riga Biennial. In 2022, Škarnulytė participated in the group exhibition Penumbra organized by Fondazione In Between Art Film on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale. Her numerous prizes include the Kino der Kunst Project Award, Munich (2017); Spare Bank Foundation DNB Artist Award (2017), and the National Lithuanian Art Prize for Young Artists (2016)), and she was nominated as the candidate for the Ars Fennica art award 2023. She received an undergraduate degree from the Brera Academy of Art in Milan and holds a masters from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art.
Her films are in the IFA, Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou collections and have been screened at the Serpentine Gallery, UK, Centre Pompidou, France, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and in numerous film festivals including in Rotterdam, Busan, and Oberhausen. Most recently she concluded her tenures at Art Explora and Cite des Art, which occurred on the heels of another significant residency at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. She is a founder and currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway and is a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective, recently commissioned for a new work by the First Toronto Biennial.

The Baltic Studies Program at the Yale MacMillan Center presents “Discipline and Care: Institutional Spaces in Late Soviet Estonia” by Ingrid Ruudi, Juris Padegs Postdoctoral Associate, Yale University
Location: Luce Hall, Rm 203
Register to attend on zoom: https://bit.ly/YaleBaltic-12423
Building up an image of a healthy and progressive Soviet society presupposed concealment and dislocation of subjects deviating from the social norm – the physically and mentally disabled, the elderly, and the orphaned or neglected children. What kind of places were assigned to such non-normative subjects? What were their spatial characteristics, how did these impact the living experiences of their inhabitants and contribute to the construction of such marginalised subjectivitites? The talk will focus on institutional spaces of Late Soviet Estonia, detailing the ideologies conditioning the establishment and design of the institutions as well as the architectural solutions determining the appearance and quality of the spatial environment. The architecture of nursing homes and orphanages will be analysed in juxtaposition with user accounts of the instititutions.
Ingrid Ruudi is senior researcher and visiting associate of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts, and is currently Juris Padegs postdoctoral associate at the MacMillan Center of Yale University. Her dissertation was titled Spaces of the Interregnum: Transformations in Estonian Architecture and Art 1986 – 1994. She has also been active as a curator, including the Estonian pavilion at the Venice biennial and research exhibitions at the Estonian Museum of Architecture, and is editor-in-chief of the Estonian bilingual art history journal Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies in Art and Architecture.
Photo: Tilsi orphanage, screenshot from the film Naerata ometi (Well, Come On, Smile) by Leida Laius, 1978.

In 1923 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rebuilt modern Turkey on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Lausanne ordered that all Muslims of Turkish decent who were living in Greece be exchanged with any Greek Christians living in Asia Minor. This population exchange of nearly two million people has left deep traces, many of which are still perceptible today. Fortunately one thing soothed the resulting pain and resentment: both Greeks and Turks had been growing olive trees since the olden days, providing a main source of survival and wealth. They lost their homes, but found new olive groves offering the livelihoods they needed.

Sponsored By: The REEES Program at the Yale MacMillan Center and the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
After the full-scale Russian invasion, researchers in Ukraine – among many other things – were forced to reconsider their professional practices. The urgency of response to unprecedented events combined with the need to navigate numerous vulnerabilities, respond to ethical challenges, and follow principles of academic compliance. Natalia Otrishchenko will address all of these issues based on the experience of the international documentation initiative “24/02/22, 5 am,” launched in early March 2022 to document the war’s everydayness through personal stories of internally displaced people and volunteers.
Natalia Otrishchenko is a research fellow at the Center for Urban History in Lviv and an associate researcher at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology (2015, Institute of Sociology, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). Since March 2022, Natalia has led the Ukrainian team within the “24/02/22, 5 am” international documentation initiative. This Fall, she is a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University. Natalia is interested in qualitative research methods, oral history, as well as urban sociology, spatial and social transformations after state socialism.

Robert Braun, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Political Science, University of California - Berkeley
Professor Braun’s research focuses on civil society and intergroup relationships in times of social upheaval and has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society and Social Forces. His first book “Protectors of Pluralism” tries to explain why some local communities step up to protect victims of mass persecution while others refrain from doing so and is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. his second book project, “Bogeymen”, traces the evolution of fear in Central Europe throughout the 19th and 20th century by studying the spread of frightful figures in children’s stories.