Path 12

Luīze Rukšāne “Par atcerēšanos”/“On Remembering”

2022. gada 17. oktobris

Today living in a world bursting with images, where we often capture things pointlessly, artist Luīze Rukšāne wants to draw attention to what was a new way of remembering a hundred years ago, whereas at present it has become a part of how we remember. The painting by Luīze Rukšāne is a tribute to a photograph taken in 1910, which captures the landscape of Lake Teperis. The photograph was taken more than a century ago and serves as an impression of an ancient reality, which the artist interprets by placing details in the frame of the painting that did not originally exist either in the real landscape or in the photograph.

In 1900, Kodak introduced the first inexpensive, mass-market camera that made photography accessible to non-professionals. In earlier times, people could have various formal portraits of ancestors or relatives at home – paintings or photographs. A cheap portable camera meant that the transient moments of everyday life – vacations, gatherings – could be turned into pictures and collected in a photo album. Beyond the emergence of a new type of photography, this era marked an unprecedented way of remembering events.

This way of remembering serves as a tool for our brain, but it can also become a dangerous tool of deception. Thereby, we frequently acquire “memories” that are not ours at all, which do not arise from our own experience, but instead have been observed in some photograph, which is such an accurate representation of reality that it seems to have been experienced in actuality.

The artist Luīze Rukšāne has created the mural with an intention to evoke and direct the viewer’s attention to photography as a carrier of memories.

 

Imants Ziedonis Foundation Viegli educational direction Ziedoņa klase is implementing a project “Me, A Human Being in the World”, A Tool for Fostering Contemporary Culture Processes (project No. EEZ/2021/1/28) with the support of the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism for the period 2014–2020 programme Local Development, Poverty Reduction and Cultural Cooperation, awarded under the open call Support for the Creation of Professional Art and Cultural Products for Children and Youth.

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