Photo reportage from the exhibition 'White Walkers' curated by Kaspars Groševs at Tallinas St. 10, Riga

October 3, 2017
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Published in Photo / Video from Latvia

Evita Vasiļjeva – Hormones, 2017

Installation view

In 1923 Duschamp quit art to become chess player. Looking to the right shadows from bishops and pawns still wink at you. Ambulance cars whistle by with a piercing regularity. Couple years ago Kurt Meier, 67, a Swiss-born member of the Seychelles team collapsed in from of everyone at chess championship in Norway. It happens. But anyone can play chess with Duschamp’s ghost that live on the internet.

Corporation’s mascot as a ghost, stretched well beyond the roofs, marches with giant marshmallow steps to crush people and cars. Ghost Weather Station reports that Harvey has brought spirits of the dead with it. Corporations fight with Harvey, but for some reason they pretend to not see the electromagnetic guests. Bones of a running deer crack like an almost turned off radio in lit up nights. I don’t look forward to winter, but it’s coming. Even though I cannot imagine it, icicles will menacingly glimmer, steps in snow will squeak and ghosts will dance under my windows silently humming: Pam-pam-pam-pam-paam-pam.

A movie spins pages forward, but punctuation marks fall in piles like autumn leaves in suburban yard. Where does our suffering come from? Perhaps from the ability to imagine the worst that can happen. Your heart could stop beating during the chess championship for example. Or someone makes you laugh to death. It’s not funny. Or maybe it is. Living dead are marauding the streets and spitting quotations in all directions. The weather is unusually damp or is it too warm? At any moment it’s both too cold and too hot, but the boundary is hard to detect. When to cry and when to laugh – it seems simple. When to frown, when to wink, put out the tongue, scratch nose? Do you play poker? If so, any word is excessive.

John F. Kennedy’s brain is still lost. Does anyone miss it? After all I have never seen what’s left of Lenin. But I’ve heard his voice, compressed and persistent. You’ll say – hearing isn’t seeing, but will be left of imagination once I’ve seen everything? Entering the door I see the same thing every day, and yet not. Three cents that are place on the drawing of a dog have changed their value today, if you exchange them to yens, sens or rins. There’s more dust. Objects cast new shadows. Upstairs neighbors try out new dance steps. Even sentences in books have changed – opening them anew there’s no “that same place”; it won’t be “that” place any more. It also won’t be “Tuesday’s me” that will read it. I will be “today’s me”. Me at six fifty nine. Et cetera.

When Ariadne’s thread is torn, there’s no way back. Ask Jack Torrance. The magic mountain still awaits. From east and west, from south and north. Heaven knows what, but it does. There’s no way back. Every morning coffee is a little death, but every death is a call to adopt. There is no other explanation for square watermelons.

Photos that I have lost are still somewhere. They are waiting like ghosts for the right moment to frighten. Like unemployed with a master’s degree they know more than they can tell. White walkers keep silent – inevitably we put words and sounds into their destroyed mouths. Everything that has happened in the past and that is happening right now. Echos, rumors, quiet sneers, roaring ocean, sharpening saw teeth, the sound when a light bulb fuse, sweaty wailing, clattering of heels too high, dyslectic poetry, song of a wet grass, crackling of glaciers, grinding teeth in dreams, banging of a hammer, car buzzing, tearing paper, not answering to e-mails, paint dripping on a synthetic carpet, squeaking stairs, pouring coffee liqueur, electromagnetic waves, FM, AM, stereo, mono, quadraphony if you want or even cacophony, silence, sawing of a stick with two ends, coke becoming muddy with a ringing splash, shivering of goose bumps, loud lamentation, plunking of ice cubes, wheezing, mumbling, words with no end, sentences that consist of a single “yes”, filing nails against sandpaper, buzzing mosquitoes, ghost howling and so forth and so on.

Artists: Jaakko Pallasvuo, Carl Palm, Viktor Timofeev, Rūtenė Merkliopaitė, Aapo Nikkanen, Evita Vasiļjeva, Marianne Vierø, Īrisa Erbse, Līva Rutmane.
Curator: Kaspars Groševs

White Walkers
23/09 – 22/10
Tallinas st 10, Riga