Enclave is a multidisciplinary artistic project carried out in various Kaliningrad institutions, museums and public spaces. The project is the fruit of a collaboration between the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw and the Kaliningrad Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), a federal institution promoting artistic culture in Russia. The Enclave project’s starring character, leading theme, and main location is the city of Kaliningrad – 300 km from Warsaw, the capital of the Russian Federation Oblast [Province] of the same name that occupies a tract of territory fully enclosed by Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic coast, making it a Russian exclave.
Straddling the Polish-Lithuanian border, Russian Kaliningrad has a long German history. Indeed, it carries beneath its surface the spirit of another, older city, as today’s Russian agglomeration was built on the ruins of German Königsberg (or: King’s Mountain). The city suffered major devastation during World War II and acquired new geopolitical significance in the post-war period. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kaliningrad Oblast, formerly an integral part of the ‘Imperium’, became an exclave territorially cut off from the Russian Federation by Lithuania and Poland. More recently, Poland’s and Lithuania’s accession to the EU has intensified the Oblast’s territorial and geopolitical isolation. Today, it is a non-EU enclave within united European territory.
(…)The aim of the Enclave project is to artistically acknowledge the complex geographic, political, historical, cultural, emotional, psychological and existential realities of Kaliningrad. The project’s key themes are conceptions of territory, memory, multiculturalism, identity, isolation, seclusion and solitude.
Curators : Ewa Gorzadek, Stach Szablowski