ARMPIT, Latvian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015
The Latvian pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition presents ARMPIT, a multimedia art installation by Katrīna Neiburga and Andris Eglītis. It is a sculpted system of building constructions interwoven with video-stories about a peculiar local phenomenon, “garage elves”, who tend to spend their leisure time tinkering with various mechanisms in workshops set up for this hobby.
Andris Eglītis has created an improvised cast of the peculiar microcosm of the garage communities. It is a kaleidoscopic system of sculpted building structures, made of prefabricated building materials of the vernacular shantytown architecture. The building structure is interwoven with the video narratives by Katrīna Neiburga. Her portraits of the members of garage communities reside as imagined inhabitants of the newly installed dwelling, which reminds a mixture between a convent and a sweat-shop.
This is the first collaboration of the artist couple, with each contributing through his or her usual artistic practice. Katrīna Neiburga usually works with time-based media, using them in her socio-anthropological investigative art, multimedia installations and scenography. Andris Eglītis tends toward the traditional in his choice of media; his desire to experiment with painting and novel sculptural forms has led him to turn to architectonic exercises as a bodily experienced practice versus concept-based art.
Latvian Pavilion fits in with the Venice Biennale’s overall artistic concept, Latvian exhibition is in perfect harmony with the Biennale’s focus on specific languages and positions of thinking created by artists. The presence of a broader vision and criticism of the ego, which is barely noticeable in other works, sets us apart.
The title of the exhibition was conceived by Miķelis Fišers as a universal formula that the viewer can interpret subjectively: as a question, as a surprise, as history or as a prediction. Miķelis Fišers daring to pluck the most hidden strings of human feelings, creating justifiable anxiety about the prospects for tomorrow, while at the same time balancing a sense of guilt and feelings of fear with the desire to take a risk.
It was unclear how all three parts of the exhibition would co-exist within the Latvian Pavilion. Everything – the painting, the light installation and the wood carvings – functions well together and that a lovely harmony of materials and stories has taken shape. Vsitors pausing in the right places, and reflect what can go wrong. The answer follows, “Everything!” It seems like they were expecting this question.”
The exhibition is augmented by an exhibition catalogue, which includes sketches of works by Miķelis Fišers and all the works of art created for this year’s exhibition, essays by curator Inga Šteimane and Estonian artist Margus Tamm about esoteric narratives in Latvian and Estonian contemporary art, as well as an essay by Ilmārs Šlāpins on Miķelis Fišers’ desire to create the right state of consciousness in the minds of viewers.
Artists
Katrīna Neiburga & Andris Eglītis
Katrīna Neiburga (1978) holds an MA from the Latvian Academy of Art in visual communications. She has been exhibiting since 2000 and has participated in the Sydney and Moscow biennales. In 2008, she was short-listed for the Ars Fennica Award and recieved the highest Latvian award in fine arts. A sizeable investigative video story “The Printing House“ (2012) about an abandoned high-rise attracted attention in Riga, Helsinki (Cable Factory Gallery), Budapest (Trafo Gallery), Tallinn (KUMU), Vilnius (National Gallery of Art), and elsewhere. Katrīna Neiburga has often closely collaborated with sound artist Andris Indāns. She has also worked on set designs for the Latvian National Opera, the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre and elsewhere, collaborating on the staging of various plays. In 2015, as a video scenic designer she was offered to collaborate on the staging of the opera “La Damnation de Faust” at the Opera Bastille in Paris.
Andris Eglītis (1981) has studied fine arts at Latvian Academy of Art, I.E.Repin Saint Petersburg Institute of Art, Russia, as well as at HISK in Gent, Belgium. Although oil-painting prevails in his artistic practice over other forms of media, there are also sculptures he has done in collaboration with the beaver community at his country-house artist studio, and novel architectural installations usually built as narrative prototypes for his figurative paintings. In 2013 he won Purvītis prize, the highest award in fine arts in Latvia.
The Exhibition
The Latvian pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition presented Armpit, a multimedia art installation by artists Katrīna Neiburga and Andris Eglītis. Armpit is a sculpted system of building constructions interwoven with video-stories about a peculiar local phenomenon, “garage elves”, who tend to spend their leisure time tinkering with various mechanisms in workshops set up for this hobby.
What is at the basis of this whole “pastoral” interest in men who spend their leisure time in voluntary seclusion, tinkering in workshops with self-invented gadgets? There is a temptation to see them as guardians of the illusory belief that it is possible to find an interconnection between the real and the technologically conjured materiality of modern living. Our attitudes to the manufactured realm of things tend to become ever more passively consumerist. The reason for this is not only laziness but also fear. Even though the rhythm of our lives is increasingly often determined by various devices, we are prevented from breaking into their hermetically sealed mechanisms by the risk of losing our right to, metaphorically speaking, warranty repairs.
Artists Katrīna Neiburga and Andris Eglītis have built a spatial monument to marginal everyday creativity. It was inspired by a sample of vernacular architecture with local character – the Soviet era co-ops of private garages whose owners have adapted them for the hybrid use as workshops-cum-dachas. The closed microcosm of garage co-ops, where the socio-economic environment has blended with personal space, provides a step back in time. Men are still boys, but their tinkering is both the trade and hobby of individual entrepreneurs, since self-exploitation as leisure time activity is a time capsule where neoliberalism has enclosed the postindustrial proletariat.
Installation art
Katrīna Neiburga and Andris Eglītis have built a spatial monument to marginal everyday creativity with local character. It was inspired by a rather primitive sample of vernacular architecture – the Soviet era co-ops of private garages whose owners have adapted them for the hybrid use as workshops-cum-dachas. In the Baltic countries that are sandwiched between Russia and Poland, there is much talk about the creative industries and references are usually made to Scandinavian design. Yet the bulk of exports consists of raw lumber resulting in mass deforestation. To work as a lumberjack is one of the few opportunities available in the countryside for not joining the unemployed.
City life, of course, is more extravagant and a case in point here is the inhabitants of the «tuned up» garages. Tending to their hobby, on the sidelines of the shadow economy, these men have inadvertently formed a branch of a maker movement characterized by brutal techno-romanticism. The story about garage men inhabiting the periphery of Europe is a pastoral of the digital age. The ability to take apart and put together a car engine is about the same as it was in 1845 for Henry David Thoreau to «borrow an ax, go to the forest, and begin to fell some rather young, tall and slender pine-trees» with an aim to build a hermit’s shack for himself.
Owing to his journal, we have got to know a lumberjack by the name of Alek Therien. This simple and natural man for whom “vice and disease had hardly an existence”, fed chickadees from his hand and swung his ax with the élan of an artist. For carrying out their idea, both artists focused on gender-related stereotypes that are still alive in the periphery of Eastern Europe. The art installation is the embodiment of a normal male world – with emphasis on «normal». Hence the architectural fragments here are made with a circular saw and crowbar, not shunning personal physical effort, and the spatial ambience is reminiscent of the boyhood war games played in tree houses or in the labyrinths of backyard woodsheds.
The closed microcosm of garage co-ops, where the socio-economic environment has blended with personal space, provides a step back in time. Men are still boys, but their tinkering is both the trade and hobby of individual entrepreneurs, since self-exploitation as leisure time activity is a time capsule where neoliberalism has enclosed the postindustrial proletariat.
Extract
Excerpts of some audiovisuals in the installation:
“Armpit. Initial visuals are of a hairy, possibly sweaty, mal armpit. The Latvian Pavilion truly is a male world, delving into the daily creativity of post-Soviet space and time.”
/Ieva Astahovska/
“Some of the garages have been adapted for living. Others serve as hobby workshops. In some, cars are still kept. It is a closed male commune. A convent for retired blue collars from Soviet economy and engineers from factories closed in the course of neo-liberal reforms. With the enthusiasm of alchemists they are continuing to occupy themselves with inventing new mechanical devices or re-soldering microcircuits pulled out of second-hand gadgets.”
/Kaspars Vanags/
“The story of garage men inhabiting the periphery of Europe is a pastoral of the digital age. The ability to take apart and put together a car engine is about the same as it was in 1845 for Henry David Thoreau to “borrow an ax, go to the forest, and begin to fell some rather young, tall and slender pine-trees” with an aim to build a hermit’s shack for himself.”
/Kaspars Vanags/
“[…] I remember the feeling of running my fingers over the ends of a bundle or stack of wooden sticks. The feeling is very strong and very old, certainly prelinguistic, and extremely intimate and charged.”
/David Levi Strauss, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual/
“The emergence of Soviet garages was a part of the process of privatization of private life in the country. […] Garages were usually located relatively far from owners’ houses, so from the very beginning the garages demanded the role of a “second home””
/Kirill Kobrin/
“The workshops set up in the cooperative garages represent a closed microcosm where the socio-economic environment has blended with personal space. The creative activities of the particular community are both the trade and hobby of the individual entrepreneurs. Self-exploitation as a leisure time activity is a time capsule where neoliberalism has enclosed the postindustrial proletariat.”
/Kaspars Vanags/
“The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman. In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced.”
/Nick Land, Fanged Noumena/
“Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with
Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life.”
/Karl Marx, a socialist/
“How does a man create? He creates a different reality, another world with its own rules. A man creates an instruction for a different reality and, while creating it, is guided by it. Skyscrapers, typewriters, convertibles, trumpets, football, chess etc.”
/Marts Pujāts, a poet/
“A man is simply a dreamer. He has to imagine, fantasize and invent.”
/Marts Pujāts, a poet/
“When these men are busy doing their thing and you look at their faces, it is not really clear whether they are jerking off or filing something. Their faces are tense, their breathing is irregular, droplets of sweat are covering their foreheads, their movements are rhythmical and monotonous.”
/Oksana, a high-school teacher/
“They [Soviet garages] are just empty spaces that can be filled with nostalgia, fear, joy, hatred, disgust; with anything you want.”
/Kirill Kobrin/
Venice Biennale 2015
The 2015 Art Biennale closes a sort of trilogy that began with the exhibition curated by Bice Curiger in 2011, Illuminations, and continued with the Encyclopedic Palace of Massimiliano Gioni (2013). With All The World’s Futures, La Biennale continues its research on useful references for making aesthetic judgments on contemporary art, a “critical” issue after the end of the avant-garde and “non-art” art.
Through the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor, La Biennale returns to observe the relationship between art and the development of human, social and political reality, in the pressing of external forces and phenomena: the ways in which, that is, the tensions of the external world solicit the sensitivities, the vital and expressive energies of the artists, their desires, the motions of the soul (their inner song ).
La Biennale di Venezia was founded in 1895. Paolo Baratta has been its President since 2008, and before that from 1998 to 2001. La Biennale, who stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends, organizes exhibitions, festivals and researches in all its specific sectors: Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934). Its activities are documented at the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) that recently has been completely renovated.
The relationship with the local community has been strengthened through Educational activities and guided visits, with the participation of a growing number of schools from the Veneto region and beyond. This spreads the creativity on the new generation (3,000 teachers and 30,000 pupils involved in 2014). These activities have been supported by the Venice Chamber of Commerce. A cooperation with Universities and research institutes making special tours and stays at the exhibitions has also been established. In the three years from 2012-2014, 227 universities (79 Italian and 148 international) have joined the Biennale Sessions project.
In all sectors there have been more research and production opportunities addressed to the younger generation of artists, directly in contact with renowned teachers; this has become more systematic and continuous through the international project Biennale College, now running in the Dance, Theatre, Music, and Cinema sections.