SEEMINGLY HIDDEN / ŠĶIETAMI APSLĒPTAIS
2021, Dom gallery, Riga, Latvia

The installation ”Seemingly Hidden” is a series of large-format photo prints on fabric and scale models of the space.

There are six elements in the installation: ”insight”, ”the hidden 1”, ”the hidden 2”, ”the passage”, ”the unambiguous”, ”the opaque”.

The elements of the installation consist of the image and the material on which this the image is transferred, they are doubles of themselves. Fabric repeats fabric and they have one and the same characteristics – to fall, to hang, to cover, to cover, to form draperies, to fall on the floor. The installation looked at the universal white fabric and its multiplicity, from the white canvas, to the white tablecloth and the white sheet, studying the white fabric in the cultural space of Latvia and fabric as a painting object in Western art.

A memory of a space or a memory of a dream arises by transferring memory distortions into physical materiality. Strange new forms that maneuver in the liminality between familiar and the unrecognisable. “The Seemingly Hidden” is an invitation for the viewer to imagine what has been hidden under the cover, and what has now disappeared from it to no longer be decipherable as there is only a digital sign left. Installation elements remind of objects found in physical space, which resemble representations of upholstered furniture, curtains, beds, tables, coffins (?), but are not what they pretend to be and are only apparent remains of objects, they are already a kind of their own.Simulacra of things.

Installation is an encouragement for the viewer to move in the space to experience the space illusory nature of the photo print by approaching it from different angles.

As a conclusion of the exhibition a performance was made. Poem by Ieva Viese was written as a response to the artwork. Singing is performed by Henrijs Poikāns and Dārta Lapiņa.

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Echo Gone Wrong photo reportage:

Photo reportage from the exhibition ‘Seemingly hidden’ by Beate Poikāne, Dom gallery, Riga

Linda Gabarajeva on the Seemingly hidden

I am not an unwelcome guest nervously waiting behind the door, I have been invited in.

A little box of miracles. I remember old photographs of children watching a puppet show, their eyes carrying the notion of a miracle. I have been granted permission – to devour candy because it is holiday, to throw a coin into the fountain.

I will quote myself, hoping you won’t mind – a shadow upon a shadow, upon a shadow, upon a shadow.

How to make a fabric more fully fabric? And which one is more a fabric – the one forming a shape or the one carrying an image of a shape? But – why do I need to make a distinction, why am I looking for opposites?

To-do list

I

let reflection bring with it a connection of images, and not a division of surfaces

II

let the deceptive fall to the ground and not build action or certainty upon it,

let it fall to the ground and continue on ahead, observing the contours

of the path’s surface

III

let the sun kiss me

Poem by Ieva Viese, translated by Jayde Will

I am not being cheated. It is not a disguise concealing honesty. The veil brings joy, the veil has features, not only that which is behind it.

The transparent and the impenetrable are next to each other, I am beside them both, I want to look inside them both. So it is at other times, too.”