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For instance, Mudīte Gaiševska was a theatre director who participated in the performances of Andris Grīnbergs, an icon of Latvian performance art. Most importantly, each artist in the exhibition reflects on our ways of reading history. I wanted to include alternative as well as official artists to understand how they worked within the given frame and how they could find creative languages to express themselves. We settled on these seven artists based on our teamwork. Why did you choose these particular artists?ĪS: Our main material was the archive. MT: The exhibition focuses on seven artists from the Soviet era. There are differences in how power worked and we can also see this in art and its development.Ĭeramic forms by Rita Einberga. Latvia differs from other partners since it was part of the Soviet Union, while the Poland and Yugoslavia (up to a point) were in the Soviet influence zone. In September we organize a conference in Warsaw with our partners with a focus on how we can work with histories of women artists’ during the Socialist period. Next step will be putting this content online. We worked on this research which lead to the exhibition for a year. In Latvia we approached the Art Academy of Latvia and we also held an open call to build a diverse team of people from different disciplines interested in the subject. In each institution the research has been done slightly differently.
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But after the first phase of the project, realizing that women have been behind double curtain – firstly being apart from art processes in the Western world, and secondly excluded based on their gender, the “Not Yet Written Stories” was initiated to fill in the gaps. This platform was started several years ago by Arton Foundation in order to give international researchers access to art processes that happened behind the Iron Curtain. We are four institutions working separately on this topic and building up a platform, where we will share our research online via the website. The Photography Center in Zagreb and Contemporary Art Centre in Ljubljana also joined. ( For more see, -women-artists–archives-online-new-innovative-art-project-to-fill-europ/#izstade). While revising our work, Arton Foundation ( Fundacija Arton) in Warsaw invited us to participate in the project “Not Yet Written Stories. That was a turning point and pushed us to consciously give voice to women’s work through our exhibitions and education programs, being a collective of women ourselves. For instance, we translate important art theories into Latvian, and we noticed that only one woman – Susan Sontag – was included in the list of sixteen publications. How did you come to work with the project?Īndra Silapētere: About three years ago when critically revisiting our publications and exhibitions at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA), we realized that we had not paid enough attention to women’s intellectual work and heritage. Women Artists’ Archives formed a part of an international project in which you participated with a team of 10 researchers. Margaret Tali: Research for I Remember, Therefore I Am. They include quotes from early Soviet Latvian media outlining the rhetoric that women faced. Exhibition view with porcelain plates by Rasa Jansone and Ieva Melgalve.