I'm thrilled about the opportunity to present my talk titled "The Afterlife of a Forgotten Archive: Artist Sophie Thun Interprets the Photographic Legacy of Zenta Dzividzinska," live on Zoom at 5 pm EST on Saturday, March 8, 2025, as part of a global online conference "Women of Photography."
This is the link to the abstract of my talk: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/womenofphotography/2025/schedule/63/
The full conference program is available here: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/womenofphotography/2025/
Recommended Citation:
Tifentale, Alise, "The Afterlife of a Forgotten Archive: Artist Sophie Thun Interprets the Photographic Legacy of Zenta Dzividzinska" (2025). Women of Photography: A 24-Hour Conference-a-thon Celebrating International Women’s Day 2025. 63. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/womenofphotography/2025/schedule/63
Abstract:
Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011), a Latvian artist, developed a distinctive photographic practice in the 1960s and early 1970s, investigating methods to capture a woman’s experience. She worked across genres, styles, and techniques ranging from documentary approach to abstraction and photomontage, from spontaneous self-portraits to elaborately staged setups with female friends as models. Unfortunately, most of her work was not published or exhibited during her lifetime. Only a decade after Dzividzinska’s untimely death in 2011, her legacy emerged from obscurity and began to receive international attention.
In 2021, Dzividzinska’s photographic archive became a focal point of the solo show of Vienna-based contemporary artist Sophie Thun (b. 1985), curated by Zane Onckule and titled “I Don’t Remember a Thing: Entering the Elusive Estate of ZDZ” (Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga, Latvia, July 15—September 12, 2021).
In addition to exhibiting her own photographs, Thun used the duration of the show to study Dzividzinska’s archive and to print new images from Dzividzinska’s negatives in a temporary darkroom that she had installed in one of the gallery’s rooms. Onckule invited another collaborator, art historian and librarian Līga Goldberga, who, alongside Thun, worked as an archivist. In front of the spectators, Goldberga opened the boxes where Dzividzinska had kept her negatives, prints, and papers, listed their contents, and helped Thun with the selection of negatives.
The new prints that gradually filled the gallery walls were recognizably Thun’s, while they also highlighted recurring themes in Dzividzinska’s oeuvre, such as the introspective self-portrait. Thun refers to her method as “interpreting” Dzividzinska’s work. Thun’s interpretations spark a discussion of authorship and agency as well as care and collaboration. Meanwhile, exposing the darkroom process and publicly conducting research in a previously unexamined private archive speak of the historical invisibility of many female photographers’ labor.
