Elīna Vītola

Built with Berta.me

  1. The Cut duo installation with Flo Kasearu at the Survival Kit 21, Eduards Smiļģis Theatre Museum, Riga, Latvia

    Together they look at the question of the divisions embedded in the current legal status of the museum and in the larger mechanisms of partition in general.

    The museum’s garden is divided between the city of Riga, the state, and the successors of Smiļģis, forming an unresolved bind. The plot gets more and more divided with each generation until it is perhaps dissolved. For the artists it becomes a theatre of cuts, partitions and lines. They use the theatre curtains, which they first wash in the garden’s pool and then hang as laundry. The curtain-laundry-sculpture called a Cut will divide the garden in a straight line, trespassing any obstacles in its way: be it a fountain, an existing sculpture or pathways. The curtains, a traditional theatre metaphor of a cut, but also of a desire or a beginning, are themselves both elements of division but also of a common line. Recently, they have actually disappeared more and more in the theatre context and re-appeared in visual arts, making any borders more porous and more dissolved.

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    2021

    Commissioned and produced by Survival Kit 21, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA)

    Curated by Joanna Warsza & Övül Ö. Durmușoğlu

    Text by Joanna Warsza

    Photography by Margarita Ogoļceva, Elīna Vītola and Flo Kasearu