黑料不打烊

From 4 February to 1 May 2022, the exhibition ES_TEXT will be held in the Main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art (Ja艈a Rozent膩la laukums 1, Riga).

Texts permeate our daily life, they look at us from the screens of our devices, talk to us from our television sets, podcasts and announcements. Urban environment can no longer be conceived without signs, messages, posters, graffiti and other texts and it is impossible to imagine what it would be like if they had never appeared in art.

Curators of the exhibition, Elita Ansone and Leonards Laganovskis, turn to works of art that include text 鈥� text-based art or linguistic conceptualism. Over the course of the 20th century text-based works have persistently penetrated into visual art until the conceptualists, in their fight for the dematerialisation of art in the 1960s, decided to push images out of works of art altogether, or, more precisely, transformed text itself into an image. A new artistic movement, conceptual art, was defined in the late 1960s, having already worked to circumvent the ever more commercialised art world for the entire decade. To a large extent, the beginnings of conceptual art are connected specifically to linguistic conceptualism.

Half a century after the birth of conceptual art, the exhibition Es_Text surveys examples from Latvian art whose main aspect is an idea represented in words. In these 鈥渨ord pieces鈥�, like in semiotics, attention is directed towards the systems of signs used by society and the ways in which information, whose form and content is a result of social contract, is passed through the visual representation of these signs. Without this convention, it would be impossible to communicate about cultural processes.

One of the most important systems of convention is language, whose understanding helps in communication. The exhibition's title, Es_text, includes letters and words from different languages, the first is the Latvian personal pronoun, followed by the underscore which is typical of digital texts, after which we see the English word for text. Es_Text can also be read in Latin, meaning 'you are text'. The title of the exhibition suggests that boundaries between languages as well as forms and functions of text will be broken down, generating an interplay of the endless possibilities of signs, meanings, forms and functions. The exhibition uses an inter-textual approach, making works of art 'talk' to each other.

The exhibition will present around 200 works by 70 artists 鈥� objects and installations, painting and graphic art, photography and video, books and diaries, materials from the artists' archives. Among the artists are recipients and nominees of the Purv墨tis Prize, Ilm膩rs Blumbergs, 膾riks Bo啪is, Andris Bre啪e, Ivars Drulle, Kristaps 蘑elzis, Mi姆elis Fi拧ers, Kristaps Kalns and Sarm墨te M膩li艈a, Maija Kur拧eva, Kri拧s Salmanis, text group Orb墨ta 鈥� Art奴rs Punte, Vladimirs Svetlovs, Sergejs Timofejevs and Aleksandrs Zapo募s; artists from the first generation of Latvian conceptualists, Juris Boiko, Hardijs Ledi艈拧, Andrejs Kalna膷s, Leonards Laganovskis; artists, whose works use words, signs, letters, numbers, texts to express their ideas 鈥� M膩ris Bi拧ofs, Kristians Brekte, Izolde C膿sniece, Miervaldis Polis, L墨ga Purmale, Guntars Sieti艈拧, M膩ris Suba膷s, Imants Tillers, R奴si艈拧 Roz墨te, Valdis Villeru拧s and many more.

One of the characteristics of text-based art in Latvia is the so-called poetic conceptualism 鈥� works created through the synthesis of quotations from literature, painterly aesthetics, imagination and text. An important part of the exhibition are works which should be seen in social and political context, which strive to push the viewer out of the comfort zone and are critical. In text-based art, an ironical perspective on a phenomenon is expressed using the visual language of that phenomenon. The selection of exhibits also includes examples of art and older artefacts created before the heyday of Latvian conceptualism in the 1980s. The earliest work in the exhibition is J膩nis Pau募uks' 1945 painting Felicita with the Newspaper, while the oldest artefact is a copy of the Rosetta Stone (196 BC).