Pārvietošana / Displacement
23.05.–30.08.2026
Sīpoliņa Gallery
Opening Night
Saturday, May 23, 2026, 19:00 (Museum Night)
Krista Svalbonas is a Latvian-Lithuanian mixed media artist living in Philadelphia. Her acclaimed architectural and photographic work explores themes of displacement, cultural identity, and memory.
Blomberg, laser cut pigment print, 15 x 21” (38,1 x 53.34 cm), 2020
This exhibition brings together works from Displacement and Echoes of Resistance, two interconnected series by Krista Svalbonas that examine displacement, memory, resistance, and the lasting impact of political violence across generations. Rooted in the artist’s Latvian and Lithuanian heritage, the work reflects on histories of war, forced migration, Soviet occupation, and cultural survival in the Baltic region.
At the center of the exhibition is the largest presentation to date of Svalbonas’s Displacement portrait series, featuring more than eighty portraits of former Baltic displaced persons who lived in refugee camps in Germany following World War II before emigrating to the United States and Canada. Developed through years of travel, interviews, and archival research, the portraits preserve the stories and presence of a generation whose experiences of exile, statelessness, and rebuilding have often remained absent from public memory.
The exhibition also includes Svalbonas’s laser-cut photographic works from Displacement, which focus on former displaced persons camps in Germany. Through extensive archival research, the artist located and photographed the actual sites where thousands of Baltic refugees lived in the aftermath of World War II. Into these photographs, she laser cuts fragments of plea letters written by refugees to the governments of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain requesting food, medical supplies, and sponsorship for emigration. The texts physically shape and fragment the architectural images, transforming them into fragile structures that reflect the uncertainty and precarity experienced by those who lived within them.
Also included are two large-scale works from Echoes of Resistance, Svalbonas’s newest series exploring the forests connected to the Baltic Partisan movement following World War II. Created as anthotypes using native plant pigments, the works embed the material of the landscape directly into the photographic image. The forests become both witness and refuge, carrying traces of hidden histories, survival, and resistance.
Together, these works consider how photographs, landscapes, and personal histories carry memory across generations, asking what endures in the aftermath of war, displacement, and erasure.