EKA, A-501
Start Date:
16.12.2024
Start Time:
17:00
End Date:
16.12.2024
Inga Lāce’s research specialises in modern and contemporary art across Soviet and Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia as well as its diaspora, with a particular focus on migration and transnational connections. She was C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at MoMA, New York (2020-2023) and has an extensive history of curating internationally, with previous projects including the Latvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019); Survival Kit (2017-23); Portable Landscapes at Villa Vassilieff, the Latvian National Art Museum and James Gallery at CUNY (2018); Riga Notebook at Muzeum Sztuki (2020); It Won’t Be Long Now, Comrades! at Framer Framed (2017); Performing the Fringe at Konsthall C (2020) and Pori Art Museum (2021).
Making a Museum Being a Guest
In this talk Inga Lāce will talk about her experience and work as Chief Curator at the Almaty Museum of Arts, a new private museum opening in summer of 2025 in Almaty.
She will particularly speak about
Qonaqtar, a group exhibition drawn from the museum’s collection which explores the connections and tensions between hospitality and migration, with a focus on Kazakhstan, Central Asia and neighbouring regions.
The title of the exhibition Qonaqtar (Konaktar) originates from the Kazakh qонаq (qonaq), meaning ‘guest’, derived from the Turkic root kon- (to ‘land’ or ‘descend’). It embodies the deep-rooted tradition of welcoming guests with warmth and respect, reflecting nomadic customs where hosting travellers was essential for survival in vast, often harsh landscapes. Guests can also be of a different nature of course, and hospitality can be abused, which is where the exhibition nods at the often forced migration campaigns of the Soviet Union where the act of hosting for Kazakhstan and Central Asia wasn’t a choice. Most notably, the Russian settlement in Central Asia in the nineteenth century, or the displacement of Koreans to Central Asia in the 1930s, and sending Soviet dissidents to Karaganda, stories that also, in one way or another, contributed to the society and art scenes of Kazakhstan.
Guests becoming locals and hosts and locals becoming guests somewhere because of fleeing or displacement is an endless theme of migration yet here it opens up a highly region-specific prism.
Co-funded by:
