For the very first time almost the entire collection of video art of the Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), assembled over the last five years, is shown together. The viewers will see a small yet outstanding selection – video works by Sarmīte Māliņa and Kristaps Kalns, Kārlis Vītols, Ieva Epnere, Ēriks Apaļais, Krišs Salmanis, Kristaps Epners, Miķelis Fišers, Maija Kurševa, Katrīna Neiburga, and Krista Dzudzilo.
Escapism in nature, the necessity to explain the world in interconnections according to a unifying principle, the inability to find fulfilment and spiritual growth in a consumerist culture.
The narrative of these works covers a rather broad range – from the religious miracle of the resurrection of Christ during Easter in Sarmīte Māliņa and Kristaps Kalns’ work Altar (2006) all the way to Miķelis Fišers’ play with conspiracy theories in his work Language Lesson (2015). The earliest work in the LNMA video collection is Katrīna Neiburga’s feminist project from 2003, Traffic, showing a woman in a role that is fairly dangerous to her – that of a taxi driver. Meanwhile one of the most recent is Kārlis Vītols’ animation The End, created in 2018, about a man affected by midlife crisis, who is trapped in his memories and attempts to come to terms with the sense of the physical and spiritual end.
It is hardly a secret that exhibition goers frequently do not even watch video works till the end since time is scarce and the clock is counting the minutes set aside for seeing the display. The creators of the exhibition believe that now is the right moment to see works you might have missed or would like to see again.
