Elīna Vītola

To Pay an Arm and a Leg at Kogo in Tartu, Estonia.

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Text by Ieva Astahovska

“To pay an arm and a leg” – to pay an extremely high price – is a popular idiom in English; it is used in a wide variety of situations, and its origins are said to date back to the Second World War. It seems to equate apparently incompatible things like buying, selling and corporeal existence – because a high price can apply to many things. In the context of the exhibition title, the idiom asks questions about the value and experience of both art and life, including the cost of life choices. These themes are also important in Elīna Vītola’s other works, as captured, for instance, in the phrase “Common Issues in Painting and Everyday Life”, the title of her series of solo exhibitions, ongoing since 2017. In the current exhibition, she connects reflections not only on art and life but also on the past and the present, the personal and the collective, the known and the unspoken. 

As a painter who departs from the usual paths of painting and works with a conceptual yet abstract artistic language, Vītola is searching, this time, for new ways to connect the content-based and the non-representational threads of art, by doing so, engaging its materiality, technologies and space in a dialogue. 

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We can fully understand the present only in the light of the past, the influential British historian Edward H. Carr once wrote. This seems particularly relevant when we think about today’s political and social turbulences, which recall others in our region, experienced by previous generations. But what if this past and its memories are hiding or silenced, contradictory, unknowable, and in the end, difficult and dark? How to think and talk about it when, despite the data and facts discovered, there is no direct evidence or material? How can an art exhibition help to reopen and talk about this past?

These questions run through the exhibition and become its counterpoint, even though its origins were quite innocent, even sentimental: the artist’s interest and desire to know more about her great-uncle whom she never met because he disappeared during the Second World War. For he too was a painter, more precisely, a craftsman who created applied and functional works of art, such as decorative interior paintings. Through archival and other research, and hearing stories from unexpectedly found relatives in different parts of the world, the artist uncovered the twists and turns of her great-uncle’s life but also the contradictions and silences about him in the family memories. These sources disclosed not only the biography of her lost relative but also the unpleasant and difficult memories of the Second World War and post-war era and the silences that still accompany them in society at large. Some chapters in this biography: hiding from Soviet forces in 1940 at the beginning of the Soviet occupation; disappearing from the family; resurfacing in a filtration camp; a military career in the security police during the German occupation in Riga; and unthinkably… his probable involvement in Arajs Kommando, a notorious paramilitary killing unit active in Latvia during the Holocaust. Then disappearance again; emigration to the UK; mental disorder and a life in a psychiatric clinic where he was secretly cared for by his brother, who also fled to the UK.

The unexpected, dark and traumatic Arajs Kommando discovery came to light when the artist was conducting her research and led her to employ not only aesthetic but also ethical strategies on how to explore, understand and imagine what cannot be understood. Even after extensive research, her great-uncle’s biography remains fragmentary, obscure, without material proof or direct evidence. Hence, it is retold in the exhibition as a multi-layered visual reflection on the representable and the non-representable, which seeks to both translate and encrypt possible meanings and narratives, so subjecting the entire gallery space to transformations and manipulations. 

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The main elements involved in this mosaic-like reflection are decorative painting (an allusion to the great-uncle’s craft), using historical fresco techniques on today’s quick-build construction materials: paintings on the gallery wall and drywall sheets that are ready to be built-in in any given environment; and smaller paintings with ornamental structures. As the artist poignantly describes it, “the environment is ready to be lived in, to adapt the facts. Paintings to be hung on paintings, by accepting the temporality, the current fact of existence.”

The depictions on the fresco paintings are in tune with both the visuality of the archival documents the artist worked with during her research and art’s decorative function to cover up the unpleasant “as if nothing happened, to cover it without a trace”. In these paintings, the prevailing form is the line, the simplest shape the painter’s brush can draw, decorating the living space and abstracting the concrete. The lines in the space also include the painted ribbons next to the drywall sheets; they connect unexpectedly with the dark side of the past the artist has been exploring. The dense cotton fabrics of the ribbons are produced in the still-existing textile factory Lenta in Riga, which was transformed during the German occupation of 1943 and 1944 into a labour camp for Jews deported to Riga from other European countries and later murdered in the Holocaust.

However, the decorative layers that smooth and cover are confronted by a hole, made in one of the gallery’s walls and revealing what is hidden behind the white cube of the space. It opens up a view into a deeper, previously invisible part of the space, exposing the drywall structure as if it were an X-ray image, a “skeleton in the closet”, an open secret. This underlines that the exhibition is not about the past but how it echoes and affects the present. The layers of continuity are also called to mind by the apple tree at the gallery’s front door, a hint of the artist’s connection to and within the family tree and also within the context of the art world.

While it remains situated between the representational and the non-representational, concreteness and abstraction, the exhibition is also part of a broader flow of artistic research that brings to light “forgotten” and silenced and violent facets of the past through micro-histories of individual and family stories, while at the same time referring to collective memory. From such an active and emancipatory position, which engages both cognition and imagination, it cannot, of course, overcome the heavy and violent burden of the past, but breaking the silence can also be a path towards reconciliation with the past and a critical yet empathic reflection on the present.

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2024

Curated by Ieva Astahovska

Photography by Marje Elma and Madis Palm