How do we pull the arrow out of the heart rather than yelling at the archer? asks poet Alice Walker. For the 16th Baltic Triennial Prologue Event, this question lingers like an unresolved chord. Walker reminds us that no one escapes those moments in life when sorrow, anger, or despair pierce the core, leaving us to reckon not only with pain, but with how we choose to respond to it.
This night, staged at the modernist Composers’ House, unfolds within that reckoning. Grief is present here as something both collective and unevenly borne, shaped by global suffering and profound moral failures. In response, poets, artists, and musicians gather not to offer solutions, but to intervene through attention, sound, and shared presence – to meet social heartache where it lives rather than turning away from it.
If such gestures feel insufficient, that insufficiency is part of the work. Despair and mourning are approached not as conditions to be resolved, but as spaces of listening, where patience, porosity, and care become possible. To remain with despair is an act of fidelity: an attunement to what has not yet vanished, to the faint persistence of hope beneath lament, and to what waits quietly to be heard again. If this moment demands grief, then let it unfold in unexpected, unruly ways – ‘Hard times require furious dancing’, Alice Walker reminded us – and afterwards we shall proceed with moving wildly.
More information is coming soon. Stay tuned.
NIKITA KADAN is an artist based in Kyiv. His work focuses on past trauma and everyday survival in Ukraine, with a particular interest in collective memory and historical politics. Since 2022, his practice has explicitly addressed the war in Ukraine. Kadan has also curated number of projects, including ‘Tryvoha’, presented in the basement of Kyiv’s Voloshyn Gallery, converted into a bomb shelter during the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, and ‘Looking into the Gaps I–IV’ (2024–26), a travelling and evolving exhibition, realised across Kyiv, Dnipro, Lviv, Sokołowsko, Berlin, Teshima and Tokyo, dedicated to interrupted narratives within Ukrainian art.
NATALIA SIELEWICZ is an art historian and writer, currently serving as Chief Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Over the past ten years, she has curated numerous exhibitions at the museum, most recently ‘Maria Jarema. Cracked Modernism’ (2026, with Éric de Chassey). In 2026, she will curate the Estonian Pavilion at the 61st Biennale di Venezia, presenting the artist Merike Estna. Her writing and curatorial practice often interrogate feminism, affective politics, and the technological conditions shaping contemporary subjectivity.
