Yet again, censorship tests artistic freedom – recently in Latvia. Familiar culture war dynamics were exercised: wedge issues, purity tests, and grievance politics. These tactics are familiar to many today, from banning books and bodily autonomy, to anti-woke legislation gripping the United States.
Within the first month of Estonian artist Sander Raudsepp’s1 solo exhibition Afterlife: Dying to Get There at the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Center for Art in Latvia, a controversy erupted in October 2022. Religious leaders condemned several pieces in the exhibition as offensive to believers, conservative media amplified the claims, and a city official demanded they be removed. The Rothko’s administration acquiesced.
The censored works were from One of four subsets of works in the exhibition, this collection of speculative cruciforms utilizes a range of icons from a gingerbread figure to a cascade of hearts to guns and penises. Each reflects the values of another world in a skewed but recognizable reflection of our own. With the exhibition, Raudsepp grappled with his thinkingfever dreams of our age, with content ranging from conspiracy theories to internet jokes, cast with a childlike awe of the strangeness of society. He often speculates on other realities intoned with a dark and mischievous magical realism, distinctive to the Baltic. The works are like screen grabs from fables populated by grinning tricksters.
