"Avant-Garde in a Cottage Kitchen: Photographs by Latvian artist Zenta Dzividzinska from the 1960s," The Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden, November 20, 2014.
Invited speaker on the occasion of a contemporary art exhibition Society Acts (September 20, 2014 - January 25, 2015), The Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden. Co-curator of the exhibition, Maija Rudovska, had included in the show a selection of photographs by Latvian artist Zenta Dzividzinska. My talk was aimed at introducing the Swedish public to the artist's oeuvre and the broader context of Latvian photography in the 1960s.
Read more about the exhibition concept on E-Flux.
The talk presents the extraordinary life and artistic career of Latvian artist Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011), focusing on her artistic output of the 1960s. Her choices were untypical and unconventional for the art world under the Soviets, and her works have remained relatively invisible even now. She chose photography as her major medium in time when photography was not considered a "real" art. Being almost the only woman in the competitive and patriarchal circle of unofficial art photographers in Riga, she succeeded in gaining their respect while still in her early twenties.
Alise Tifentale presenting the talk. Photo: hon Sun Lam.
However, her favorite subject - photographic depiction of everyday life in a country house featuring members of her extended family - was regarded as unsightly and ridiculous, thus most of her work has remained unpublished even now. That’s also where the cottage kitchen in the title of the talk comes from – that’s her parents’ little house in countryside, a village called Iecava in Southern part of Latvia. Even though she was educated in art school in the capital city Riga, and all the art world was happening in Riga, and all the jobs were there, most of the time Dzividzinska resided there and commuted to Riga. The small and cramped kitchen was a makeshift darkroom for her photographic work.
What understood meant by the word “avant-garde” in the title – in this case, I use the term to describe a radical practice, something that is ahead of time, a practice that is still to be understood by the public much later. Despite her being acknowledged as one of the leading fine art photographers in the late 1960s, during this decade Dzividzinska had only one solo-show – in 1965, in an art bookstore in Riga. Her next (and last) solo-show followed in 1999.
