For the Latvian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia the artist duo Skuja Braden will present ‘Selling Water by the River’ – a rich installation of 300 porcelain objects, which features new commissions alongside work from the last 20 years. The exhibition is curated by Solvita Krese and Andra Silapētere, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA).
Selling Water by the River’ will see Skuja Braden move their shared living space, located in the Latvian town of Aizkraukle, to the Arsenale of La Biennale di Venezia. This personal recreation will endeavor to address the shifting borders between private and public space within a wider social context.
Official opening: Thursday 21st April, 3pm CET
Press tour with curators Solvita Krese and Andra Silapētere, LCCA: Thursday 21st April, 2pm CET
Discussion, Maps of Refugee Modernism(s), a collaboration between the Latvian Pavilion and Yiddishland Pavilion presents a talk about Jewish, Latvian, and Ukrainian refugee and diaspora artists: Saturday 23rd, 2pm CET
Arsenale of La Biennale di Venezia
For ‘Selling Water by the River’ Skuja Braden, an international artist collaboration born in 1999, between Ingūna Skuja from Latvia and Melissa D. Braden from California, will create a multilayered installation that maps the mental, physical, and spiritual areas of their home. In doing so they hope to offer insight into different readings of the history of the Baltic region and to test the readiness of its current society to live up to the challenges of the present day, including the growing polarization of opinion. In the exhibition, home thereof is echoed by deeply personal images in porcelain, a material that the artists have mastered.
What shapes our understanding of public and private space, and what is our role in constructing these views? How can we fashion our surroundings to be as inclusive and open as possible? Where disagreements and conflicts often arise is where private and public spaces meet; a place where different values intersect. For example, the presence of the LGBTQIA+ community is still a sensitive topic in the Baltic and the broader region of Eastern Europe. Although times are changing, even within these regions, that which is different from heteronormativity has often clashed with conservative worldviews linked to a nationalist discourse within the framework of a tradition of a patriarchal society.
Co-curators Solvita Krese and Andra Silapētere say, “Skuja Braden have chosen such a framework for their exhibition at the Latvian Pavilion, because of the coming-to-be of their unique selfhood and their queer self-identity and the time that they spent together at a Zen Buddhist monastery in California that has influenced it. Their confidence drawn from Buddhist teachings, when mixed with a Californian free spirit and experiences of post-socialist life into a singular mélange, helps when it comes to finding solutions in these areas of conflict both everyday situations and creative practice. Is the water different in California, where Melissa is from, to the Daugava River, the Latvian body of water on the banks of which lies Aizkraukle, a town built under the auspices of Soviet industrialization, where Ingūna grew up and where the artist duo lived and worked for many years?”
The Latvian Pavilion is commissioned by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, commissioner Solvita Krese (LCCA), organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) and executed by the creative team: artists Skuja Braden (Ingūna Skuja, Melissa D. Braden), curators Andra Silapētere and Solvita Krese (LCCA), producer Kitija Vasiļjeva, architect Līva Kreislere, graphic designer Rūta Jumīte, art handlers Aleksejs Beļeckis and Pauls Jēgers, and the communications team of Copywriter/Levelup (Olga Procevska, Igors Gubenko, Jekaterina Firfjane), Sofija Anna Kozlova (LCCA) and Alexia Menikou.
Saturday 23rd April, 2022, 2pm
Maps of Refugee Modernism(s), a collaboration between the Latvian Pavilion and Yiddishland Pavilion presents a talk about Jewish, Latvian,and Ukrainian refugee and diaspora artists. Participants include Andra Silapētere, Inga Lāce, Maria Veits, Yevgeniy Fiks and others. Yiddishland Pavilion is a hybrid online-offline project aimed at tracing and analyzing contemporary Yiddish and Jewish discourse in contemporary artistic practice. Its activities will unfold in Venice, Italy and online between April and November 2022. The Yiddishland Pavilion has initiated dialogue and collaborations with national pavilions at the 59th Venice Biennial 2022 of countries with histories of Jewish settlement and migration. The Yiddishland is an imaginary state/country/nation/land with no borders connected through Yiddish language and culture.
For more information: www.latvianpavilion.lv
