“Medūza“ is pleased to present the exhibition “÷” by the young artist Ieva Rižė. The installation, titled after the sign of division, consists of the artist’s latest video work and an object in which one can see traces of decaying plant dust.
The exhibition “÷” is a meditation on time. Usually depicted as an unbroken chain of events, in the film time is revealed as a fiction – something that the human eye imposes on objects as their order. Such time allows us to connect fragmented events into a meaningful whole, but at the same time it displaces everything that does not fit into the frame of this narrative. This is the work of memory, which, as Walter Benjamin observed, is also the work of forgetting.
Rižė’s fiction is autobiographical insofar as it speaks of this forgetting. It also talks of the fragments of experience that operate unnoticeably and somatically in everyday life. Here, even the most banal, unconscious fragments of memories begin to dictate already conscious thoughts before we are conscious of them ourselves. Perhaps this is why the artist’s body, which appears in the video, is fragmented, clumsy, striving for something. Its identity can only be predicted by the objects that surround it, which define it, establishing its boundaries and anticipating expectations. These objects are more concrete and tangible than the abstract, beckoning human figure pointing towards them.
Perhaps these objects also have a memory that is engraved in their matter and form? If so, then perhaps they are also doing their own work of forgetting? Could the dust of decaying plants also held to be the fragments of their unconscious?
Ieva Rižė (b. 1988) is a sculptor and performance artist who uses strategies of archiving objects, images and sounds in her work. Unique artefacts of decay become part of new motifs in her work: collected seeds and debris, a sheet of wood marked with spores of portobello mushrooms, the torso of a snake grown by the artist, a piece of skin soaked in the pollen of a decaying bouquet, or already used joint compresses. In 2017 Ieva Rižė graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a Bachelor’s Degree in Monumental Painting and Sculpture, and in 2023 she will be defending her Master’s thesis in Sculpture. She has participated in exhibitions at CAC, Vilnius; Studium P, Vilnius; 427 Gallery, Riga; SpLab, Aarhus; Auditorium Saint-Germain, Paris among others.
The organizers of the exhibition would like to express their sincere gratitude to Jokūbas Adamonis, Henrik B. Andersen, Ervinas Faktūra, Alanas Gurinas, Monika Janulevičiūtė, Agne Jokše, Monika Pietaryte, Laura Kaminskaitė, Monika Kalinauskaitė, Deimantas Narkevičius and Gerda Šokelytė for all their help and support, without which this exhibition would not have been possible.
The exhibition is partly funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Ieva Rižė
÷
2023 06 02 – 2023 06 24
Medūza
Šv. Jono g. 11, Vilnius, Lithuania
Photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela
