Linda Vilka’s exhibition ‘We Are Allowed to Get Tired at the K. K. fon Stricka villa

Linda Vilka’s mind map ‘We Are Allowed to Get Tired‘, inset with 400 thousand crystals, glistens in a series of creative impulses, outlining the switch between physical and mental viewpoints in different stages of fatigue. Distancing helps ideas crystallize. Approaching allows for detailed analysis. By combining a series of works, which the artist has titled ‘Conclusions of Various Sizes’, the exhibit serves as a statement about the presence of fatigue as a perpetual part of life and how to recover from it.

By using pre-made art kits of cliché landscapes as a foundation, the artist, in her structured chaos style, takes a stand against routine adherence to the rules and, inserting one faux diamond after another, transforms the surface into a glittering palimpsest. By taking a closer look, the outlines of  a stencil can be glimpsed, as well as grids, letters and numbered spaces, conjuring up periodical exhaustion which can sometimes manifest in daily life.

A hand’s 20-centimeter journey from the container to the canvas slowly morphs into meters and kilometers, symbolizing the distance from Riga to Linda Vilka’s birthplace, Tārgale — a point which serves as the gravitational center for the ceaselessly rotating ideas. While the mind wanders in uncontrollable directions, the body repeats the same movement, as though reminding to press on. The monotonous process draws attention to the congestions of the inner world and encourages to resolve them.

This form of art, which tends to get copied without large pursuits for originality, is transformed by Linda Vilka into a conceptual playpen in which she toys with the semantic meaning of words, solves brain teasers and conducts experiments in matter. The artist encourages putting down the manual and exploring the world intuitively, from time to time reminding ourselves — you are allowed to get tired.

Curator Tīna Pētersone

Linda Vilka (1995) is a multi-disciplinary artist and storyteller, having studied art in Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and currently pursuing a professional doctorate in the Art Academy of Latvia. The artist works with memory, the importance of its preservation and drawing more focus on rural areas. So far the most significant projects have tackled the surrounding Tārgale parish, where aspects of communal art and environmental curation have been introduced  to make contemporary art more accessible, as well as disrupt the daily rural routine. Linda Vilka shares her observations in the form of installations, videos and public performances, interweaving all of it with textual form — abstract and sometimes quite absurd phrases and lines that in most cases have been noted down from the surrounding environment, people and past situations.

Located in the display window of K. K. fon Stricka villa, Riga’s Smallest art gallery is so far the smallest art gallery in Riga in terms of square footage and its expositions could be viewed only from Aristida Briana street. However, with the opening of Linda Vilka’s solo exhibition, Riga’s Smallest gallery has also undergone some changes. Now, for the first time, guests could view the exhibition from the gallery’s interior. The rest of the exhibition’s works could be viewed in the villa’s Great hall.