On the Edge Fest – Baltic Way 35

For the third season, Okapi Gallery is curating the festival “On the Edge Fest”, which this year focuses on the 35th anniversary of the Baltic Human Chain. The festival aims to look closer at border conflicts in different regions, especially where there has been warfare or other current social problems. The ambition of the festival is to evolve into a thematic and regular event, involving different partners and covering the inner and outer space of the city. As in previous years, the festival will be held in the OKAPI Gallery in the Old Town, the outdoor gallery of the Telliskivi Creative City, the Art Street of the Baltic Station, and, as a brand new venue, the VABAMU Museum of Freedom and Occupations.

“The Baltic Way” exhibition will feature mainly historical documentary footage of the events of the Baltic Way in August 1989 in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as the transition years of the end of the Soviet era and the beginning of the Republican era more broadly, such as the protest demonstrations in Hirvepark in August 1987 and the tragic events of January 1991 in Vilnius. More specifically, it will present historical photographic material capturing political and social tensions, national uprisings, and the quest for freedom in the context of the collapse of the USSR. One of the aims of the exhibition is to highlight a historically significant turning point in the life of that time for a wider audience today.

Jaan Künnap (1948) is an Estonian photographer and mountaineer who has had solo exhibitions, won awards in photography competitions, written books on photography and hiking, been a documentary film director, and worked as a photographer at the Tallinn City Museum.
The OTEF will showcase his black and white documentary photographs of small villages and roads along the Baltic chain, as well as the Interfront demonstration in the center of Tallinn on 9 May 1990.

Aivars Liepiņš (1953) is a Latvian artist who acquired the basics of photography independently, but also studied at the Department of Journalism at the Faculty of Philology, University of Latvia. He has worked as a photographer for various press publications, was one of the founders of a photo news agency, and co-authored many books and albums. His photographs have been published in Latvia and various publications abroad exhibited in the Latvian National Art Museum and the Latvian Museum of Photography, among others. His aerial photographs of the Baltic Chain are exhibited at OTEF.

Romualdas Požerskis (1951) is a Lithuanian photographer and a member of the Lithuanian Association of Photographic Artists, who studied at Kaunas Polytechnic Institute.
His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in his native Vilnius, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, as well as in Tokyo, Berlin, Munich, and elsewhere on the international scene. In the photographs of the Baltic Chain presented at OTEF, Požerski’s artistic compositions and ambitions also come to the fore.

SERIES BALTIC WAY Photographs without an identified author. The collection is from the photo archives of the Estonian National Museum and the Tallinn City Museum, the authors of the barracks are unidentified…