The winter double bill at Impressions Gallery in York, In From The Cold, focuses on countries associated with the big chill: the Baltic nations and Siberia.

The legacy of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union provide the context for two photographic exhibitions, each complemented by free talks, events and film screenings that will run throughout the season.

From November 20 until January 22, Facing East draws together 16 artists at work in the Baltic region, including photographers from fledgling EC member states Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In this exhibition they assess their new global position, their environment and what it means to live "East" at the beginning of the 21st century.

From January 29 to April 1, Magnum photographer Carl De Keyzer documents Siberia's prison camps in the British premiere of his Zona exhibition. His colour images give an insight into this remote part of the world, where one million prisoners continue to live in the forced labour camps that were notorious for their appalling conditions during Stalin's rule.

Put together by Liz Wells, a media arts lecturer at the University of Plymouth, Facing East collates responses to the changing European landscape.

Nordic countries and the smaller Baltic states historically have had to face east, as borderline states between Russia and Western Europe, but after the break-up of the former USSR, and the easing of travel restrictions across the Baltic Sea, they now face west. Meanwhile, through the enlargement of the European Union, with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia all joining this year, we face east to them.

"Facing East indicates the huge diversity of cultural histories, social themes and aesthetic approaches which characterise this geographically close, but unfamiliar, region," says Liz.

Exhibits include Jari Silomki's Weather Diary, a daily record of landscape photographs, scrawled with his commentary on events both personal and global; fellow Finn Riitta Pivlinen's Vestiges, "portraits" of frozen clothing, eerily devoid of the people who might once have worn them; and Explosion 1 by Petter Magnusson, from Sweden, who explodes the myth of the peaceful wooden house slumbering in the mountains.

Other artists are Mara Brasmane, from Latvia; Joakim Eskildsen, from Denmark; Ane Hjort Guttu, Norway; Margarete Klingberg, Sweden; Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo, Finland; Herkki-Erich Merila, Estonia; Merja Piril, Finland; Gatis Rozenfelds, Latvia; Juha Suonp, Finland; Per Olav Torgnesskar, Norway; Remigijus Treigys, Lithuania; and John S. Webb, from England and Sweden.

Curator Liz Wells will give an introductory talk from 2pm to 3.30pm tomorrow when she will comment on several works in detail; Kitchen Stories, Bent Hamer's cult Norwegian comedy from last year, will be shown at 7pm on December 8; and education manager Helen Rice will discuss the exhibition over a complimentary cup of lunchtime coffee or tea in her lunchtime talk, Feed Your Mind, from noon to 1pm on January 12.

Each event is free, and so is admission to Impressions, whose opening hours are 10am to 5.30pm, Tuesday to Saturday.

Updated: 09:12 Friday, November 19, 2004