Contemporary Art and Folklore: Unlocking the Underworld (UNART)

Project No: lzp-2024/1-0479

Implementation period: 2025-2027

Project funding: EUR 300 000

Head of the project: Dr. Philol Toms Ķencis

Project team: Toms Ķencis, Jana Kukaine, Ieva Melgalve, Maija Rudovska

Contemporary Art and Folklore: Unlocking the Underworld (UNART) is dedicated to examining the burgeoning representations of chthonic mythology within Latvian contemporary art. The project investigates how evocations of the folkloric underworld catalyze, sustain, and invigorate the dynamics of cultural and social critique in creative practices since 1991.
UNART will explore the Latvian art scene through a multidisciplinary lens, combining textual and contextual analysis with insights from post-socialist art history, feminist aesthetics, ecocriticism, postcolonial and post-Marxist theories, and creative ethnography. This innovative approach aims to uncover new social and political dimensions of the long-standing relationship between folklore and professional arts.
The project's outcomes will include three scholarly articles, a monograph, popular publications, and two datasets. Additionally, UNART will organize an international research seminar and a summer school. The project will be spearheaded by two researchers with combined expertise in folklore studies and contemporary art, supported by two doctoral candidates.
This initiative will contribute a contemporary chapter to Latvian art history and provide a replicable model for comparative research and mapping emerging trends in post-socialist Europe.