Laurie Anderson, Emigre Culture, the KGB, and the Dream of Connecting: (Soviet) Latvian Artists in (West) Berlin, 1977-1992

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture series, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: Kevin C. Karnes is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Music at Emory University. In this presentation, Karnes will talk about Maija Tabaka (pictured above), who was the first Soviet citizen to be awarded the DAAD fellowship. Tabaka unwittingly opened doors to over a decade of artistic exchanges between Riga and West Berlin.  She also provided an enduring model for arranging such collaborations, with offices of the Latvian KGB partnering with Latvian emigres to broker relationships, awards, and creative possibilities. Mining archives in Berlin and Riga, this talk traces the origins of such exchanges in the 1970s, their evolution in the time of perestroika, and their end in an ill-fated endeavor to support the dream of the Latvian musician Hardijs Lediņš to record with Laurie Anderson in a newly reunited Berlin. For more information, click here.

Co-sponsored by Center for German and European Studies