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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2022
Abstract
Riikka Taavetti's contribution addresses intertwined queer pasts and Soviet legacies in Estonian public discussion. She examines an art exhibition by the Estonian contemporary artist Jaanus Samma, titled “Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman's Tale.” Originally produced for the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, the exhibition caused controversy in the media when presented at the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn in 2016. According to Taavetti's analysis, both of these contexts framed the exhibition with questions of victimhood. In the framework of an international art event, questions of human rights violations were highlighted, while the environment of the Museum of Occupations emphasized questions of the suitability of a homosexual man as a victim of Soviet repression.
Keywords: victimhood, queer, politics of memory, post-socialism, museums, Jaanus Samma
Introduction
In April 2016, the opening of an exhibition at the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn aroused exceptional reactions. Mart Soidro described the coming exhibition in Saaremaa island's regional paper, Meie Maa:
In the popular speech it is even called a gay exhibition. Those on the more conservative side stamp their feet and old freedom fighters have helplessly lowered their hands – what will their eyes see before death!? The unacknowledged fact is that this exhibition was not planned to irritate “the extreme right and Putinists,” but it represented Estonia last year in the 56th Venice Biennale. (Soidro 2016).
The art exhibit described in such an intentionally controversial way was “Not Suitable for Work (NSFW). A Chairman's Tale” by the contemporary Estonian artist Jaanus Samma. The work was a combination of photographs, short films and installations, all based on sources – legends, oral history interviews and archival material – left by the life of a Soviet Estonian man known by the nickname “Chairman.” The core of the archival material was comprised of files of a court case involving a man Samma had given the pseudonym Juhan Ojaste, who in the mid-1960s was accused and convicted of pederasty, namely, consensual penetrative sex with another man.
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