elections & t-shirts.

Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room - The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013) is a mirrored installation that you have to physically enter - and close the doors to after. It's almost hypnotic and alluring, and the viewer becomes part of the artwork in the mirrors. I think it's fascinating when the artwork actually invites you in.

 I found this video really interesting because of the point it was making - these days people are more interested in art that can guarantee a good photo, rather than a good experience. In all honesty that is very disappointing and disheartening but on the other hand it opens up a whole different possibility of sharing art and its message. Something that is easily accessible and visually pleasing would thereby gain more coverage.

 

This is an older performance & installation that I went to see at the Barbican a few years back but it always comes back to me as it changed my opinion of viewers interaction with the art. It saw multiple rollerskaters and naked dancers move around the venue whilst the viewer could walk around and explore different corners and messages left by the artist. Sometimes the viewer would have to stop and move aside to let the performers get past them. It was strange to see how uncomfortable some people got when the performers were close to them - almost as if they thought they were to become a part of the performance.

I'm interested in that discomfort. How could I make something accessible yet uncomfortable?

My own answer to this question was - location.

At this point I had already gone outside and taken some 'product' photos, and I found it interesting how unusual yet natural they looked at the same time.

It reminded me of shoe tossing, and made me think of how strange it is to see clothing outdoors when it's not actually worn by people.

And so I thought - wouldn't that be an interesting concept for presenting images?

It was actually this, together with my confusion leading up to election month in Latvia that made me decide that I wanted to take portraits of Latvians and Latvian-Russians. I decided that finding three patriotic citizens who displayed Latvian red-white-red flags in their cars and three Latvian-Russians who felt confident enough to display Russian flags in their cars would be a good start.

...To be followed by printing their portraits on t-shirts and placing them in opposite locations, and to make matters more challenging and uncomfortable, I thought that the other side of the t-shirt should feature the flags of the countries. What I mean by opposite locations is different cities within Latvia with different Latvian/Russian percentages, so for example Daugavpils is a mainly Latvian-Russian city near the border of Lithuania, thereby I'd place the Latvian t-shirt in the town centre there, and do the opposite in Smiltene, which is a mainly Latvian city.

It sounds very confusing indeed, but I feel like it almost perfectly captures the strange, bitter and diving atmosphere in Latvia at the moment as the October Parliament election is coming up, and I'd be very interested to see the reactions concerning these issues when provoked.

[in memory of my grandmother, 17.09.2018]