When I Walk In Boots I Found
Liene Pavlovska
13/04-29/04/2024
The starting points of the exhibition are the artist’s residencies in the Curonian Spit and Suomenlinna. The first is an unsteady strip of land that has been shifting with the wind, swallowing entire villages, and is being constrained by networks of tree and grass roots. The second is a cluster of rocky islands built up with defensive fortifications that at some point in time became a cage. For about a century and a half now, the two locations have been maintained and operated to please the eyes and delight those opting for a sojourn.
Liene Pavlovska wanders long enough and attentively enough to recognize the infra-structures, tipped to one side, adapted, ingrown, patched together, overgrown, (re)shaped. What is it that binds, permeates, sustains, and props us all up?
In the 1990s, textiles, synthetic fiber fabrics and grids began to be laid on our road surfaces with the goal of separating, filtering, protecting and draining. At the same time, the social fabric disintegrates, with some threads pulled out, some holes appearing, everything a bit stretched out and precarious. Did we have any boots that hadn’t been found? This permanently alters one’s sense of reality and imagination; for many of us, even when doing something else, the questions of what was it is processing somewhere in the background. Perhaps hence the need to build from what already is, and what is found. Not as scarcity-based thinking, but as a radically accepting gentleness, an awareness that nothing is truly brand new (everything new is just a moment between melting and rusting). We are here to create by connecting what already exists. Fragility, not as something easily breakable, but something that accepts finitude, or rather continuity, and through that it is more stable than any rigid grid.
The Suomenlinna fortress has become a stage for sights, images, performances, art, the historical imagination, and militarism as the past. Walking in Curonian Spit it’s easy to forget that it is not an island but a peninsula. While on our side the interests between people's desirous gazes, the trees and the dunes are balanced (is this in order to protect the habitat or the view?), behind the barriers lies a Russian Army nuclear post projecting into the middle of Europe.
Liene Pavlovska is a visual artist who thinks and works in interaction with space. Pavlovska studied at the scenography department of the Latvian Academy of Arts and at the Sandberg Institute, Studio for Immediate Spaces. Her work is based on an interest in the patterns of socio-economic systems, the resulting collective desires and how they determine the coexistence of humans and other beings.
Photos: Arta Kauliņa
Liene Pavlovska
13/04-29/04/2024
The starting points of the exhibition are the artist’s residencies in the Curonian Spit and Suomenlinna. The first is an unsteady strip of land that has been shifting with the wind, swallowing entire villages, and is being constrained by networks of tree and grass roots. The second is a cluster of rocky islands built up with defensive fortifications that at some point in time became a cage. For about a century and a half now, the two locations have been maintained and operated to please the eyes and delight those opting for a sojourn.
Liene Pavlovska wanders long enough and attentively enough to recognize the infra-structures, tipped to one side, adapted, ingrown, patched together, overgrown, (re)shaped. What is it that binds, permeates, sustains, and props us all up?
In the 1990s, textiles, synthetic fiber fabrics and grids began to be laid on our road surfaces with the goal of separating, filtering, protecting and draining. At the same time, the social fabric disintegrates, with some threads pulled out, some holes appearing, everything a bit stretched out and precarious. Did we have any boots that hadn’t been found? This permanently alters one’s sense of reality and imagination; for many of us, even when doing something else, the questions of what was it is processing somewhere in the background. Perhaps hence the need to build from what already is, and what is found. Not as scarcity-based thinking, but as a radically accepting gentleness, an awareness that nothing is truly brand new (everything new is just a moment between melting and rusting). We are here to create by connecting what already exists. Fragility, not as something easily breakable, but something that accepts finitude, or rather continuity, and through that it is more stable than any rigid grid.
The Suomenlinna fortress has become a stage for sights, images, performances, art, the historical imagination, and militarism as the past. Walking in Curonian Spit it’s easy to forget that it is not an island but a peninsula. While on our side the interests between people's desirous gazes, the trees and the dunes are balanced (is this in order to protect the habitat or the view?), behind the barriers lies a Russian Army nuclear post projecting into the middle of Europe.
Zane Zajančkauska
Liene Pavlovska is a visual artist who thinks and works in interaction with space. Pavlovska studied at the scenography department of the Latvian Academy of Arts and at the Sandberg Institute, Studio for Immediate Spaces. Her work is based on an interest in the patterns of socio-economic systems, the resulting collective desires and how they determine the coexistence of humans and other beings.
Photos: Arta Kauliņa