LIGA VELINA

LIGA VELINA, ARMANDS ANDZEE
Silver Gelatin print/ Virtual Reality/ Audio recordings

“A Place That Exists and Doesn’t Exist Simultaneously” is a multimedia exhibition that addresses the theme of memory by combining traditional analog photography with the latest technologies. Looking at the fragmentary and fragility of memories, inspiration is found in Marcel Proust’s series of seven novels “In Search of Lost Time” – in which he reproduces memories as a process in which the present and the past intertwine in an inextricable, unified journey. The experience of memories is a complex, subjective state that reflects the meanings assigned by the narrator to places, things and events. The described places in a specific form, evoking specific feelings, exist only in the narrator’s memories, therefore they exist and do not exist at the same time.

The exhibition was created during the Sansusī Wellbeing Residency in August and September 2022, where the artists collected testimonies and memories through field research, creative workshops and conversations with local seniors at the Aknīste Health and Social Care Center, as well as visiting collector Valdis Kalnietis and photographer Jānis Kurklietis. By collecting the material obtained in the residence, a series of photographs and prints were created, as well as a three-dimensional, associative environment in virtual reality, which is based on memory reconstructions and testimonies – a single intermediate space for memories and a set of imaginary worlds, which can exist in a specific form if all involved participants participate.

Participants: Jānis Kurklietis, Valdis Kalnietis, Andris Kovaļevskis, Jeļena Vinokurova, Ženija Vocevkovska, Ilga Stradiņa, Karmena Fjodorova, Aigars Timnis, Agris Priede, Igors Ansovičš, Jānis Ādminis, Jānis Poplavskis, Tamāra Tretjaka.