Celojums - The Journey, 2010

Digital prints on canvas (100cm x 100cm and 140cm x 100cm); single channel video (20” loop); 2 multi-media installations (dimensions variable). Solo exhibition in the National Library of Latvia, June-August 2010. Made possible with assistance from the Qantas Contemporary Art Award.

This solo exhibition uses digital imagery, video and personal artefacts to explore ideas about cultural displacement and loss. It is based on the experience of attempting to follow my mother’s journey from Latvia to Australia at the end of WWII through a series of displaced persons’ camps in Poland, Germany and Italy. The digital prints in the show were developed from images and video I took during my 3 month journey and one of my mother’s old school photographs, taken in 1936. I was particularly drawn to the school photo because it both captures the sense of innocence and uncertainty that accompanies childhood and provides a strange premonition of the war that was soon to affect everyone in the photograph. 

The final image shows the exhibition one week after the opening. The floors in the stacks of the National Library of Latvia collapsed and 80,000 books had to be rescued. Many books were stored in the exhibition rooms and the result looked curiously like one of my book installations.

Download the catalogue (in Latvian & English)

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